Executive Search Firms - AI Impact On Junior Learning

If AI does the junior work in executive search, how will junior people learn? In Nexco.ai's latest research, 72% of search firms explicitly kept relationships, assessment or final judgement in human hands. Yet many are already using, or planning to use, AI for earlier stages of the work, including mapping and document drafting. It got me thinking about how that judgement developed in my own career. Preparing a candidate report involves noticing where the evidence is thin, deciding what matters and having your conclusions challenged by someone more experienced. As AI takes on more of the preparation, those opportunities to learn may become less obvious, and certainly less automatic. Firms will need to deliberately create opportunities for learning. For example, junior colleagues could spend more time in client conversations and discussing difficult assessments with partners. That would require experienced people to make time, and juniors to have enough involvement to form a view of their own. But it could also offer a much richer and faster learning experience than the way many of us learned. I’d be interested to hear how search firms are thinking about this as part of our research for the third edition of the State of AI in Executive Search report. If you’d like to contribute, or see a copy of the current report, please comment or send me a message.