As students prepare for internships, recruiter sessions, and full-time roles, understanding how the industry is evolving is critical. At VCU Brandcenter, that preparation comes directly from the people shaping the work today.
Alum Jeff MacDonald (Experience Design, 2012), Director of Innovation and Technology at Movers+Shakers, recently hosted a session with Brandcenter students to share a candid look at how AI is actually impacting agencies—and what that means for emerging talent entering the field.
His message was clear: the jobs aren’t disappearing. They’re changing.
“A lot of companies are starting to look at their entry-level positions and try to understand how AI might impact those entry-level positions…overall, the jobs aren’t disappearing, they’re just changing shape.”
Beyond the AI Hype
MacDonald challenged students to look beyond the hype surrounding AI and focus on how it’s truly being used in agencies today.
While leadership teams may frame AI as a way to scale output and reduce costs, the day-to-day reality is more nuanced. In his role, MacDonald sees both sides. “I sit at the intersection between what the agency owners want and what actually is helpful to the people who use the tools every single day.”
He acknowledged that AI hasn’t fully delivered on the promise of dramatically reducing costs or instantly increasing output and that most companies are still figuring out how to use it effectively. Rather than replacing the work entirely, AI is becoming part of the process. MacDonald points to meaningful impact happening in the production layer, speeding up tasks like research, storyboarding, and social content creation.
“AI compresses the production layer of your job…what opens up is more room for the ambitious work.” At top agencies the goal isn’t automation—it’s creating space for better thinking. The most competitive teams are using AI to test ideas faster, push riskier thinking, and make more ambitious work possible. “Start thinking about AI as this tool that helps accelerate the parts of the job that you don’t want to do… so you have more time to do the work that’s important to you.”
Impact Across Roles and Concentrations
Across every discipline at Brandcenter, MacDonald emphasized the same idea: AI can generate, but it doesn’t have judgement nor taste.
Here’s how he describes AI within each Brandcenter concentration and corresponding industry roles:
- Copywriting: AI can produce 50 headline variants. That’s not going to change. But what AI lacks is your knowledge and know-how about what makes good lines, and what causes people to change their perceptions, their beliefs, their feelings. AI can’t do that. You should be using AI to help you find those variants and those surprising moments that help you get to something useful.
- Art Direction: AI can generate lots of images really quickly, but it doesn’t have any taste. A lot of what we’ve been talking about when we’re hiring the future generations of art directors is their taste and their ability to understand what good work looks like. Executionally, we want to use tools that help make your idea come to life and sell better, ambitious ideas.
- Strategy: Everyone now has the ability to do these amazing 50-part competitor reports and analyze cultural trends, but what really is missing is that interpretation—that understanding of why it matters. That really takes a human engine.
- Creative Brand Management: Account and brand managers more than ever have access to all the real-time data about what’s happening with their brand. Generating performance dashboards overnight is now considered just a normal thing. It is now more important than ever to understand the when and why you should have access to this information and how you walk your clients through that work.
- Experience Design: The world of code generation and building things has basically collapsed. Anyone in the world now can create apps and websites. It’s about bringing your knowledge and understanding of what is actually useful in the world and understanding how you take a problem and solve it. It’s more important than ever for you to understand those behaviors and bring real, remarkable work to the world, and not just the same AI bot that Claude built for everyone else.
From tools to judgment
Rather than focusing on any single platform, MacDonald encouraged students to develop a deeper skillset: knowing not only when and how to use AI, but also when not to use it.
He pointed to tools like NotebookLM, desktop AI agents, and Adobe Firefly as part of a modern workflow, but emphasized that tools will continue to evolve.
“The tool list will change every six months. The meta-skill is knowing when to reach for AI and when to do it yourself.”
What recruiters are looking for
As recruiting season approaches, the biggest takeaway may have been how to talk about AI tools in interviews.
MacDonald shared that many candidates fall into two traps: speaking too generally about AI or avoiding it altogether.
Instead, recruiters are looking for specificity and judgment. When discussing a project, lean into the process, which tools you used, and how it affected the final product. MacDonald encourages students to focus on “how you used AI, what it helped unlock, and where you overruled it.”
“This is a time for you to show how AI can support you, but that what you bring is differentiating and is unique.”
Career guidance in practice
Sessions like this are a core part of the Brandcenter experience and connect students directly with industry leaders who offer real-world insight, not just theory.
From building portfolios to preparing for interviews, students gain a clearer understanding of what agencies are looking for and how to stand out.
Brandcenter provides unmatched career preparation.
Read more about how we set our graduates up for success in the industry.