Maybe the kids aren’t alright. Now what about everyone else?

Why loading AI onto your most experienced people looks like free productivity – and why that bet quietly hollows out the firm’s ability to adapt.

I’m recently back from facilitating an HR/People Leaders summit that was exactly the kind of program I’d have been delighted to join as an attendee myself: curated, conversational, and questioning. The agenda left ample room for the attendees to engage as active, co-author/participants and to follow curiosity and conversational energy wherever they might go.

As you’d expect, most of the conversations swirled around the impact of agentic AI capabilities (as well as the anticipated impact of those capabilities) on the future of work and workforce, but the specific inquiries were fascinatingly varied. Human org design vs. agentic org design; workforce planning as a continuous process; scaling behavior change with AI adoption; the decline of interdependence; and more. I’d have loved to drop in on each of these explorations – or at least send my agent to take notes.

Suffice to say that I went to facilitate and left with plenty to think about and some new questions to ponder. One that has really stuck with me: What happens to organizations that no longer bring on (or bring up) juniors?

While the narrative of an imminent AI-driven job apocalypse has stalled a bit lately (in no small part due to a reevaluation of messaging by some of the big AI firms), leaving the bigger future-of-work picture more uncertain than ever, we have plenty of clarity on the market for juniors circa now. In a word, it’s f*cked.

A much discussed study the NY Fed released last month argues that the surge in unemployment of young college graduates is most significantly due (so far) to the impact of remote work, which has “weakened incentives to hire young workers by impeding on-the-job training.” We also know that the collapse of traditionally relied upon signals in the job market have made getting hired as a young worker particularly hellish. And none of this is even taking into account the persistent likelihood that many orgs, while not cutting headcount, are actively looking to AI tools to increase the productivity of more experienced/senior workers and NOT need to source, hire, and train juniors.

All of which is to say that the picture for that segment of the workforce is more clear and more immediately concerning than that of the workforce at large, and (this probably sample-skewed Ramp/Revelio report notwithstanding), I don’t think we’re likely to Jevons paradox our way out of this situation in the near future.

So maybe the kids aren’t alright. Now what about everyone else?

Would it not be a shrewd move to ride the productivity gains of the firm’s most experienced and most highly compensated workers? And aren’t these exactly the workers who are likely to get the most value out of the AI tools because they know the business (context/problems/etc) the best?

Well, yes… in the short run and within a certain limit. But the rub is that it may be devilishly hard to know exactly where that limit is and whether you’ll be able to see it approaching before it’s too late.

An organization with no up-and-coming next wave of talent is likely an organization designed for near-term maximization at the expense of long-term adaptability. It’s likely to be more fragile, less resilient, and less capable of creative reinvention, and it will only become more dependent on a core group of skilled operators as it becomes less fluent in communicating and passing on (and updating) institutional process knowledge.

Organizations that don’t maintain an active culture of training, mentoring, and learning may find themselves without critical capacities that benefit not only the junior employees but the organization as a whole – especially when the market shifts and the winners are determined by their ability to learn new and different things.

After years of hearing plenty of C-level and senior leaders bemoan the difficulty of managing multi-generational and especially multi-generational hybrid workforces, I’m sure there are some who would happily opt out of that challenge. They’d do well to remember that the flipside of that challenge is the opportunity to ensure their firm’s future relevance.

@Jeffrey