This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Charles Swann, a 44-year-old founder of an AI startup based in Boulder, CO. The following has been edited for length and clarity.
I founded my startup, Forage, around 18 months ago. Besides myself, I have one full-time employee who has been with the company for eight months.
My business is in the marketing technology space, and I needed someone with a deep connection to modern culture and social media. So, I hired a 24-year-old growth and brand specialist from my neighborhood. She’s a college graduate with less than two years of experience, whom I started mentoring.
The challenge with hiring someone more junior is that they often lack the skills to translate their intuition into a business strategy. But over the last six months, especially since the launch of Gemini 3, we’ve been able to leverage AI to significantly expand the capabilities of my junior employee.
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My junior-level employee initially used AI to refine her work
We work in the marketing technology space, helping brands understand the trends happening on social media.
My junior employee has a very intuitive understanding of what influencer and brand relationships should look like, as well as how brands should present themselves on social media.
When she first used AI in this role, she used ChatGPT to refine her product strategy. ChatGPT was great at taking her rough ideas, refining the concepts, and then writing out the details. As we began using Gemini more frequently, the role AI played in our workflow shifted from refining to co-creating product strategy.
Over time, AI started producing more work within my startup
The increased strategic capabilities in Gemini 3 are subtle, but they make a big difference because that strategic perspective is what young professionals often miss.
My growth and brand specialist had no prior experience writing a product requirements document before getting this role. Without AI, creating this document is a heavy lift. It’s essentially the initial blueprint for a new product feature, translating a business idea into the technical instructions needed to build it.
Writing this type of document for complex features typically would take a skilled product manager eight to 10 hours to get it right. With Gemini, my employee can do this in four to five hours.
Gemini 3 has been a significant step forward. Before using it, I had the idea that we should create 70% of the final product, and AI should generate 30%. Now, it’s probably 40% us and 60% Gemini, simply because it’s so good at expanding and expediting.
I spend less time supervising my junior employee with the help of AI
With younger career professionals, sometimes there’s a light switch that clicks, and they know what it’s like to be a leader, take ownership of something, and start running with their ideas.
My employee has really demonstrated that growth. This occurred at the same time she became more sophisticated in her use of AI.
AI now serves as that middle layer, helping her level up the work she produces. I hesitate to say that AI alone has allowed me to have less supervision, but as she started getting more sophisticated in her use of the AI tool, I’ve spent less time reviewing in detail what she’s generating and more time focused on the big-picture strategy questions.
Using AI this way can be risky, but the payoff is worth it
There’s always a risk in relying on AI to teach my employee how to gain years of experience in seconds. Hallucinations and feedback loops can occur if someone doesn’t have the experience to know when to redirect.
What I’ve done to help safeguard us is create a collection of prompt starters that include a detailed background on what our platform does, the features, and how to define it, which I can copy and paste into the chat. That’s been a giant time saver and helps keep it focused on relevant context.
However, I think running into possible mistakes or hallucinations is better than moving slowly. I would rather have those mistakes come up, and we have to course correct, than not be able to move at the pace we are.
AI has changed how I think about hiring junior employees
AI removes some of the traditional requirements around skills and expertise I need to see in candidates. It allows me to focus more on the raw intelligence, ambition, and drive.
With my company, I’m definitely bullish on the idea that brands will need the ability to authentically understand and reflect culture more than ever before, even in an AI-driven world, to survive. That type of intuitive knowledge resides with a different group of people than those my age, in their 40s, might be able to deliver.
So, I’m less concerned with whether my employee has been in the marketing industry for 10 years and more concerned with whether they have a deep understanding of the problem we’re trying to solve.
I believe this hiring mindset will only grow as AI continues to transform the workforce.
Do you operate a tiny team and want to share your story? Please reach out to this editor, Agnes Applegate, at [email protected].
