Lotte Underwood is a public relations executive who spends more time using AI than doing public relations. She is 25, joined the London agency Fight or Flight last November after a marketing degree and a masters, and her title is "AI associate".
She is part of a dedicated AI team that has built around 30 AI agents, handling industry research, client reporting, preparation for media interviews, helping clients write clearer briefs, and image generation.
Her job is to manage those agents, check what they produce, and pass the results to colleagues dealing directly with clients and journalists. Another part is monitoring how clients appear in the answers given by ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini and the rest — a task that did not exist three years ago.
"A huge part is being in client meetings and calls to work out what is actually going to be most helpful from these agents," she says.
Both things are true at once
AI is widely blamed for cuts to graduate hiring. It is also, at the same time, creating graduate roles that are specifically about AI — and Underwood's is one of them.
Those two facts are usually reported separately, by people arguing opposite cases. Holding them together gives a more accurate picture: the number of entry-level jobs is under pressure, and the shape of the ones that remain is changing.
Dillan Patel is the other example. A business management graduate, he joined the engineering software company Stride as an intern 18 months ago and was put to work building an internal chatbot designed to capture the knowledge of a senior colleague heading into retirement.
That is a revealing assignment. The task was to extract decades of accumulated judgement from one person and store it somewhere it could be queried — given to someone who had been in the building a matter of weeks.
The question worth asking
The headline worry is not that these jobs are bad. By most measures they are good ones: visible, strategic, close to clients, and far more interesting than the photocopying-and-press-clippings version of a first PR job.
The worry is about what gets skipped. The traditional first job is largely an apprenticeship disguised as low-value work. You write the dull release, and in writing fifty of them you learn what a story is. You sit through the interview prep, and you learn what a journalist actually asks.
If the agent writes the fifty releases and the graduate checks them, the output may well be better. But checking requires the judgement that writing fifty releases used to build. The skill is being asked for at the point where it used to be acquired.
What it means here
For Bangladeshi graduates entering outsourcing, marketing and software services — where a great deal of entry-level work is precisely the kind an agent can now do — this is not a distant debate. The roles that survive will be the ones that require someone to decide whether the output is right.
That makes the ability to judge the work more valuable than the ability to produce it. It also makes it harder to get, because the usual route to that judgement was producing the work first.
