Welcome to the Vogue Business Careers Guide: AI Edition.Based on a survey of over 300 industry professionals and students, this series unpacks how AI is changing careers in fashion and beauty at every level, and what it takes to future-proof your path in the AI age. Read part one here.

You’re no longer the new hire, but you’re not in the room where the big decisions are made either. You know your job inside and out, and you’re ready to progress — but promotions feel slower and teams feel leaner. As AI automates tasks and organizations reduce middle layers, mid-career professionals face a narrower path upward and greater pressure to differentiate themselves.

The challenge isn’t just learning to use AI, but also signaling that savviness to leaders and stakeholders in a way that translates to career progression. In a recent Vogue Business survey of over 300 current and aspiring fashion, beauty, and retail professionals, 88% say they feel there will be an expectation to understand and use AI in their role in the future. At the same time, only 32% say their company currently offers training or upskilling opportunities on AI, while 27% say their company offers a budget to try AI tools. Many are now preparing to take things into their own hands: 46% believe it is their own responsibility to learn about AI, compared to 31% who believe the onus is on their employer.

“We can’t escape technological change,” says one respondent, aged 35 to 44. “I think that we were all fearful at first, but it’s an aid — a tool that can support and indeed enable our productivity. I’m more neutral [about the impact of AI] than I am positive, but you never know how it will continue to evolve — I guess that we just need to evolve with it.”

When asked what steps respondents are taking to future-proof their careers against the impact of AI, most under-25s interpreted that question as how to protest against AI, whereas mid-career professionals between the ages of 25 and 45 expressed a hunger to diversify their skillsets. “The main thing for me is to stay up to date with AI and stay educated on how I can use it in my role. It’s not about fighting it, it’s about embracing it in ways that support me in my role,” says one manager at an Irish retail company, aged 35 to 44.

The mid-career stage often invites self-reflection: professionals start to question how central work should be to their lives, and whether the trajectory they’re on still aligns with their goals. But as AI reshapes roles and middle layers thin, that reflection takes on a renewed sense of urgency, says Karen Harvey, recruiter and founder of Karen Harvey Consulting. In this context, the challenge is not just to do the job well, she continues, but understanding: “How do I stand out?”

Mastering AI fluency

The first step to progressing in any organization is to deeply understand the business’s goals, experts agree. “When you opt into the middle of a system, you don’t always get a say in what’s going on at top,” says Grace McCarrick, workplace culture expert and soft skills coach. “The best leverage is to be savvy and understand the business — understand which way the winds are heading, and then provide as much value from you and your team in that direction.”

In practice, this means paying close attention to the signals leadership sends about where the business is investing time, money, and attention via company-wide meetings and communications, as well as any changes in resourcing or performance metrics. Even when formal programs are absent, these cues often reveal how central AI is becoming to the company’s future strategy. While the pace and focus of AI upskilling will depend on a company’s priorities, many experts say that most professionals looking to future-proof their careers should now develop a baseline level of AI fluency.

Experts distinguish AI fluency from technical AI skills. “It’s about being able to train the AI. AI fluency means you can take a tool like ChatGPT or Copilot or anything that the enterprise has created, and be able to, first and foremost, ask it the right questions, and then iterate on those questions or prompts to help AI answer you in a more targeted way,” explains McKinsey Global Institute partner Anu Madgavkar. “Part of AI fluency is also applying the human mind, taking the outputs and honing your ability to stress test what the AI is telling you.”

The best-case scenario is that your company offers training to help you develop AI fluency. Hugo Boss launched a learning program, Fyouture, in 2024, which offers AI training tailored to different roles and needs. The company’s leadership development program, which is mandatory for senior managers, also includes AI sessions. Farfetch hosted a week-long AI training session open to all employees last year, which included keynotes and hands-on workshops led by Google. Coty says AI literacy is “required for career progression across functions”; the company has embedded AI champions in every function and launched an AI upskilling challenge for employees to reach certain AI-related goals.

In the likely case that your company doesn’t yet offer these kinds of opportunities, experts say the best way to develop AI is to simply start using it. “Do more than ask it to plan your vacation; apply it in the context of real business problems — don’t take what it says for granted, but it’s that iterative process where fluency really comes from,” says Madgavkar. McCarrick adds that the most innovative leaders she speaks to are intentional about developing a “content diet”, with newsletters and podcasts on AI that keep them up to date in a structured way.

Selling yourself

Mastering AI tools is only part of the equation. For mid-level professionals, the bigger challenge is ensuring that their contribution is visible in ways that matter for promotions. “The reason why a lot of middle managers get left out is because they’re so socialized to focus down, that they don’t focus up and make sure they’re adding value and that their team is seen as valuable,” says McCarrick.

That visibility can come from linking experimentation to concrete business outcomes. “It’s like becoming a field researcher — ‘I did this side quest and learned X,’” says consultant Grace Abbott, who teaches soft skills to creatives through her digital platform How to Go Freelance. “There’s so much noise around AI, but if you can be results-oriented and share the learnings, that’s what’s going to make people want to hire or promote you.” That might mean using AI to streamline research, automate reporting, or shorten production timelines — workflow improvements that save time or improve decision-making.

But business impact isn’t only about efficiency. When asked which skills will matter most as AI adoption accelerates, respondents ranked critical thinking, oversight, and human communication among the most important. Yet, professionals aged 35 to 44 were more likely than any other age group to prioritize understanding how to use AI tools over maintaining human soft skills, suggesting a potential blind spot at the career stage, where leadership skills are evaluated.

That imbalance is risky, especially in larger companies. “There’s the risk that people do their very specific job, or one particular task, but may not understand the holistic, ‘Why am I doing this?’” says Abbott. “AI might solve the problem of the end game, so their cog becomes obsolete, but if they understand the holistic goal of the task they’re doing, then all of a sudden they become a bigger thinker.”

Real communication is still key, experts say. “All the AI in the world can’t land a narrative [the way humans can],” says Harvey. “You’ve got to be able to tell it internally as well — that’s how new ideas get adopted in best-in-class companies.”

Managing risk, ethics, and people

As AI becomes embedded across the organization, managers are noticing cultural and creative tensions emerging alongside productivity gains. “AI is only helpful when used as a first idea-giver — like a mediocre-trained intern. I can already sense that texts are no longer as outstanding, there is an increasing conformity, and the variety of thoughts, styles, and ideas is decreasing,” says one survey respondent, aged 35 to 44. Another respondent, aged 24 to 34, worries that AI “hinders the development of younger adults, making them more dependent and less able to think for themselves”.

Experts say these concerns highlight why judgement and people development are becoming core leadership responsibilities — from setting norms around when AI is appropriate, to ensuring junior teams continue to build critical skills.

In practice, however, that responsibility often falls on managers who lack formal budgets or training frameworks to support it. “One of the biggest issues our workforce is facing right now is how to develop people when there aren’t a lot of resources,” says McCarrick. This goes for AI fluency, but also most other skills. With limited support, McCarrick suggests “going grassroots” — set a clear vision, test tools for a few months, and create regular moments for teams to share what they’re learning.

Rather than generic training sessions, experts recommend tying AI experimentation to team objectives and cross-functional business problems to spark creative problem-solving. “If you set constraints — that you need to use these tools to solve a specific problem — it presses people to learn creatively and come back with valuable assets,” says Abbott. There are ways to incentivize this: Farfetch is integrating AI into its performance review processes, and Skims and Good American co-founder Emma Grede has spoken publicly about offering bonuses to employees who develop effective AI solutions.

Madgavkar says that upskilling teams is going to be “a combination of top-down and bottom-up, with a lot of experimentation, cross-functional teams coming together and trying things — and that in itself is the best skill-building ladder on the planet”.

With traditional routes to progression evolving, experts say the most resilient careers will be built on adaptability rather than a single job description. “In the workforce, there will be less people going up the ladder in the traditional way,” says McCarrick. “It’s about future-proofing your career, not your job.”