Developing professional judgement in the AI age.
A white paper by Alex Young, written as part of the Weekend MBA at Imperial College Business School. Publishing November 2026.
Research in progress
How are mid-market service firms redesigning junior development to preserve expertise and judgement formation in the AI age?
Generative AI is reshaping how service firms operate — drafting documents, summarising research, producing first-pass client deliverables. Most attention has gone to productivity. Far less has gone to what AI means for how expertise and judgement actually develop inside firms.
Junior work has historically done two things at once: produced client output, and developed the judgement and contextual understanding required for senior roles. When AI completes the task, what happens to the developmental work that used to come with it?
The risk is a talent pipeline problem — a generation of technically capable but judgement-thin mid-seniors who struggle with the advisory, client-facing work senior roles demand. For mid-market firms, without enterprise-scale learning infrastructure to fall back on, the risk is particularly acute.
UK mid-market service firms. Two sectors.
UK-headquartered firms selling expertise, advice or relationship-led services. Roughly 50–500 FTE or £10m–£100m revenue.
Management consulting and professional advisory firms; and marketing, creative and communications agencies.
12–15 semi-structured interviews across firm leaders, people & talent leaders, and senior client-facing practitioners. Inductive thematic analysis.
Four threads I'm pulling on.
What AI quietly takes
First-pass research, drafting, summarising, structuring — the apprentice-level work where judgement used to be built. What happens to that learning when the task disappears?
The new shape of a junior role
If juniors don't do the doing, what do they do? Where does context come from? Which experiences can be designed in, and which can't be faked.
Mid-market, not Magic Circle
Big firms have L&D budgets, rotations and structured cohorts. Mid-market firms don't. They're inventing this in real time, with smaller margins for error.
Leadership behaviours that travel
Which seniors are already adapting well — and what are they doing differently in how they delegate, review, coach and protect time for thinking?
Month by month.
Six months from question to published paper. Here's the path — and where I am on it right now.
- Phase 01May 2026Setting the question
Sharpen the research question, map the existing literature, design the interview guide and clear ethics. The unglamorous bit that makes everything else possible.
- Phase 02June 2026Finding the rooms
Confirm the sample — founders, MDs, people leaders and senior practitioners across consulting and creative agencies — and start the first interviews.
- Phase 03Jul–Aug 2026Listening hard
Run the bulk of the interviews. Begin coding and thematic analysis. Watch the first patterns — and the surprises — emerge from the transcripts.
- Phase 04September 2026Making sense
Pull the literature, methodology and findings into a single analytical frame. Pressure-test the emerging framework against what people actually said.
- Phase 05October 2026Drafting
First full draft of the white paper. Build the visuals and the framework. Send it round for honest, unflattering feedback.
- Phase 06November 2026Publishing
Edit, tighten, proofread — and ship. Public white paper out into the world, with a launch event and follow-up writing to come.
A practical framework for leaders.
The final paper will be a publicly shareable white paper — written for founders, MDs and people leaders of mid-market service firms. The aim: a clear, usable framework for redesigning junior development in AI-enabled environments, alongside the principles, organisational conditions and leadership behaviours that appear to make it work.
Weekly updates & learnings.
I'll be sharing what I'm reading, who I'm speaking to and the patterns emerging — weekly on Instagram and LinkedIn. Come along for the ride.