When to Hire Humans vs Hand It to AI
Big Tech cut grad hiring by 25%. Banks are slashing junior roles. The question every founder now faces is when do you hire a human, and when do you just hand it to AI?
Do I hire a human or hand it to AI?
Half my content team left recently.
Normally I'd panic and start posting job listings. But something made me pause. With all these AI tools floating around, what if I just... didn't replace them yet?
Sounds crazy, right? But here's what I discovered.
AI crushes the first draft stuff. Research that used to take hours now takes minutes. Rough copy that used to drain junior writers gets handled. Simple analysis that used to clog calendars just happens.
That's the easy 80%. Time consuming but not rocket science.
The remaining 20%?
Strategy, taste, trust. That's still human territory.
Google's research backs this up. AI tools help developers work 21% faster, but senior developers see much bigger gains because they know which buttons to push.
Same principle applies whether you're building products, crafting campaigns, or running strategy.
For example a senior marketer costs $120K plus benefits plus management overhead.
My AI stack costs $60 a month.
The fairytale v reality
Everyone's selling the same fairytale:
"AI will just make us all more productive! We'll focus on higher-value work!"
Meanwhile, those same consultants are quietly replacing their own teams with ChatGPT subscriptions.
AI’s eating its young.
It’s making juniors irrelevant.
Researchers at SignalFire found that Big Tech companies reduced the hiring of new graduates by 25%. Instead they actually increased experienced hiring by 27%.
This means they want people who manage AI, not get replaced by it.
Goldman and Morgan Stanley are testing AI tools to replace junior analysts. "Testing" is corporate speak for "as soon as Legal approves it."
Even software engineers are being replaced. Unemployment in IT jumped from 3.9 to 5.7% in one month.
Geoffrey Hinton won a Nobel Prize for his AI work. When asked on the Diary of a CEO what advice he'd give his own kids about preparing for AI's impact. His answer might surprise you.
The quiet massacre
Klarna replaced 700 customer service agents with chatbots. The CEO bragged about being OpenAI’s guinea pig. Then quietly hired people back when customers got annoyed. This time? Lower pay.
BlueFocus, a Chinese agency, fired all its writers and designers two days after getting Azure access. AI writes their ads now.
IBM plans to scrap 30% of its back-office staff over the next five years. That’s 7,800 roles gone.
Turnitin’s CEO said they’ll cut 20% of staff. Future hires can come straight out of high school. The only skill required? Knowing how to use AI.
Forget everything you learned about building teams.
Old World: Senior ($150k) + 2 Juniors ($120k) = $270k for decent output
New World: Senior ($150k) + AI Stack ($60/month) = $150,720 for 5x output
That $80 gets you:
Claude Pro ($20) - Your strategy brain
ChatGPT Plus ($20) - Your execution engine
Perplexity Pro ($20) - Your research team
N8N Automation tools ($20) - Your task rabbit
One senior orchestrating this stack outputs more than a team of five.
Google found AI makes senior devs 22% faster.
Juniors? Barely 4%.
Same logic applies across the board. The more experience you bring, the more AI amplifies it.
Junior developers are using AI as a crutch instead of learning how code actually works.
Stop asking "Should I hire someone for this role?"
Start asking what Julia from Aligned Recruitment asks:
"Do we need to hire headcount for this role or can this be done with one of the AI tools on the market?"
Stop hiring people to do what AI already does better
Start hiring people who know what good looks like. Taste isn't something you can prompt into existence.
One content strategist with Claude beats a room full of junior writers.
Think about your marketing team.
You've got one strategist who knows what good copy looks like, plus three junior writers cranking out first drafts. Now that strategist hands the first drafts to Claude, keeps the strategy, and you've just saved two salaries.
Same pattern everywhere. One person with taste plus AI beats a room full of people without it.
Content production is the obvious one. One strategist with Claude replaces three to five writers. A marketing lead with ChatGPT can fill an entire content calendar. An email marketer with AI outproduces a room full of juniors.
When you still need humans (for now)
The 20% AI Can't Touch:
Strategy & Taste
Knowing what good looks like
Reading the room in negotiations
Building culture and vision
Making judgment calls under pressure
Relationships That Matter
Closing seven-figure deals still takes a handshake.
Key partner management
Investor relations
High-touch customer saves
Creative Leadership
Brand voice that doesn't sound like ChatGPT
Original research and insights
Innovation that breaks patterns
Storytelling that moves people
AI handles production, while us humans handle perception.
The grad job reality
A survey of 9,000 software engineers found that 90% believe finding a job is significantly harder than it was in 2020.
Fresh graduates are stuck in that classic trap. Can't get hired without experience. Can't get experience without getting hired. Those entry-level jobs that used to train people? They're not coming back.
The skills you learned early in your career? Half of them are already useless. By 2030, 70% of the skills used in most jobs will change.
If you're hiring right now, ask yourself one question: "Can AI do 80% of this job?" If yes, hire someone who knows how to use AI, not someone who'll compete with it.
Avoid junior roles as they’re vanishing
Learn to prompt, manage, and build with AI
Showcase skills AI can’t replicate (strategy, taste, storytelling)
Solve real problems in public. Build your own role.
Your online portfolio is what will get you hired. f
Three months ago, using AI for core work was still "experimental."
Today, YC's newest batch has an average team size of 2.3 people. The last batch? 4.1.
The builders who win in the next 1-3 years will be the ones who understood this shift first.
North star
I'm not saying fire your junior team or stop hiring young talent. That's not the point.
But if you're bootstrapping a startup with three months of runway, this is your new reality. The market isn't waiting for anyone to catch up.
The fairytale says we'll all adapt and find new roles. Maybe we will. I hope so.
But right now, today, while we're all figuring this out, early-stage founders have to make tough choices with limited cash.
One senior operator who knows how to use AI can often outproduce a traditional team. Not because they're smarter, but because they know which problems to hand off and which to own.
The future’s not fair. But it’s already here.
The question isn’t whether AI will replace junior roles. It’s whether you’re hiring people who know how to use it or people who’ll compete with it.
Martin
P.S. If you’re trying to figure out whether a role needs a human or just a ChatGPT subscription, reply with the JD. I’m curious what you’re seeing.
This week's track
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Great data points here, Martin. That 25% drop in grad hiring is brutal.
Juniors doing automatable work are the first casualties. Which is exactly why AI literacy has become non-negotiable at every level.
For juniors: AI skills are now table stakes. Not to replace thinking, but to amplify it. The ones who survive won't be competing with AI: they'll be leveraging it to punch above their weight class.
For seniors: Not everyone needs to become a prompt engineer. But the best leaders? They understand AI capabilities well enough to orchestrate it strategically.
It's not about seniors learning to prompt better. It's about knowing what to delegate to AI vs humans, and how to supervise both.
You painted the picture so well. AI skeptics might push back on every word here, even if it’s all true.
The more I build with AI, the clearer it becomes: we’re already living in a time when most jobs will require some level of AI fluency. It’s not a distant future, it’s arriving, whether we like it or not.
Instead of resisting it, I’ve found it far more meaningful to lean in, stay curious, and grow with it.