This told essay is based on a conversation with Charles Swan, 44, founder of an AI startup based in Boulder, Colorado. The following content has been edited for length and clarity.
I founded a startup company, Forage, about 18 months ago. Besides me, there is one full-time employee who has been with the company for 8 months.
My business is in the marketing technology field and needed someone with a deep connection to modern culture and social media. So we hired a 24-year-old growth and brand specialist who lives in our neighborhood. She was a college graduate with less than two years of experience and I started coaching her.
The challenge with hiring younger talent is that they often lack the skills to translate their intuition into business strategy. However, over the past six months, and especially since the launch of Gemini 3, we have been able to leverage AI to significantly expand the capabilities of our junior employees.
My junior-level employees initially used AI to improve their work
We work in the field of marketing technology, helping brands understand the trends happening on social media.
My junior employees have a very intuitive understanding of what the relationship between influencers and brands should be and how brands should represent themselves on social media.
Her first time using AI in this role, she used ChatGPT to refine her product strategy. ChatGPT was great at taking her general idea, refining the concept, and writing out the details. As we started using Gemini more frequently, AI's role in our workflows shifted from refining product strategy to co-creating it.
Over time, AI began to create more jobs within my startup
The increase in strategic capabilities in Gemini 3 is subtle but makes a big difference as young professionals often overlook the strategic perspective.
My growth and brand specialist had no experience writing product requirements documents before taking on this role. Without AI, creating this document would be a daunting task. This is essentially the initial blueprint for a new product feature, translating a business idea into the technical instructions needed to build it.
Producing this type of documentation for a complex feature typically takes an experienced product manager 8 to 10 hours to do well. With Gemini, my employees can complete this in 4-5 hours.
Gemini 3 has come a long way. Before using it, we had the idea that we should create 70% of the final product and the AI should generate 30%. Right now, it's probably 40% us and 60% Gemini. Simply because Gemini is great at expansion and facilitation.
Reduced time spent supervising junior employees with the help of AI
For young career professionals, sometimes a light switch clicks and they know what it's like to be a leader, take charge of something, and start implementing their ideas.
My employees have really shown that growth. This happened at the same time as she became more sophisticated in how she used AI.
AI now acts as that middle layer, helping her elevate the work she produces. I would hesitate to say that the AI alone has reduced the need for my oversight, but as she has become more sophisticated in how she uses the AI tools, I have started spending less time reviewing in detail what she is producing and more time focusing on big-picture strategy questions.
Using AI in this way can be risky, but it's worth it
There is always a risk in relying on AI to teach employees how to gain years of experience in seconds. If you don't have the experience to know when to redirect, hallucinations and feedback loops can occur.
What I've done to keep us safe is create a collection of prompt starters that contain detailed background on how the platform works, features, and is defined, and that you can copy and paste into your chats. This saves a lot of time and allows you to stay focused on the relevant context.
But I think it's better to encounter mistakes and illusions than to proceed slowly. I think it's better to make those mistakes and correct your course than to get stuck at your current pace.
AI is changing the way we think about hiring junior employees
AI removes some of the traditional requirements regarding the skills and expertise required of candidates. This allows you to focus more on your raw intelligence, ambition, and drive.
At my company, I'm definitely bullish on the idea that brands will need the ability to truly understand and reflect culture now more than ever to survive, even in an AI-driven world. This kind of intuitive knowledge exists in a different group of people than my 40-something contemporaries can provide.
So I care more about whether people have a deep understanding of the problems we're trying to solve than whether they've been in the marketing industry for 10 years.
I believe this hiring mindset will become even stronger as AI continues to transform the workforce.
Run a small team and want to share your story? Contact this editor, Agnes Applegate, at aapplegate@businessinsider.com.
