Jason M. LemkinCEO, SaaStr · Co-Founder of SaaStr AI, SaaStr Fund, Adobe Sign

Juniors Bring the Tools. Seniors Bring the Quality Control.

18 Oct 2026 · 1 min

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1:10

In this presentation, the speaker highlights the complementary roles of junior and senior staff in internal AI adoption. Data shows juniors are 19‑38% more likely to use AI tools and are almost twice as likely to experiment, bringing a wide variety of new tools to the organization. Seniors, while fewer initially using AI, excel at spotting low‑quality (“slop”) outputs and refining results, leveraging their experience working with juniors. To harness both strengths, the company runs a recurring four‑day “AI Builders Week” where all employees take synchronized time off: juniors share tools and techniques, seniors focus on quality control, AI swapping, and ensuring differentiated AI solutions. The program is open‑sourced, with publicly available videos, schedules, and timetables for external audiences.

Chapters

Internally, juniors are 19 to 38% more likely to use AI, and they do use AI more. They're almost 2 times likely to experiment. They use a lot more tools. But here's where the complementary teams come in. They're actually not great at feeling super productive, but they're doing a lot of stuff, and there's a lot of slop. Ironically, the seniors that use AI, we don't have as many seniors that used AI initially, But they were really good at identifying slop, and they're really good at working out how to make the AI give better results because they're used to working with juniors and refining it with them. We run an AI Builders Week every couple of months where we— 4 days across the organization where it's synchronized. So everyone takes the same time off. You can't have one person tinker with AI. We have the juniors come in and share all the new tools and techniques, and the seniors come in and talk about quality control. And AI swap and how to make sure that we're building differentiated AI and not just generic AI as well. And so there's a 4-day program. We've open sourced the program. There's a link there. You can watch videos from our internal event that we've published externally. We've got a schedule and timetable of what we do for all of that.