Feed your team

AI can summarize your texts and emails; find the best route to get you to a job site; create a spreadsheet from raw data; and answer customer calls. For the most part, all this is great. Until you realize you can’t get anywhere without Google Maps turned on or your office team doesn’t know how to diffuse an angry customer.

In The Wall Street Journal article, “We All Hated Busy Work. Now That It’s Disappearing, It Turns Out We Miss It,” Allison Pohle explains the increasing occurrences of “experience starvation” as a result of AI reliance.

Pohle explains that though AI has saved a lot of time and employees are doing less “grunt” work, the unintended consequence is employees are losing their ability to actually be functional in their jobs.

She writes AI is “depriving [employees] of the way entry-level workers have long gleaned the expertise to become valuable players later on—by getting in the reps.”

She goes on to explain it is necessary for all people to learn from repetition and patterns, which allow them to make better decisions and exercise better judgment in different scenarios.

So now, companies are using AI to provide sample scenarios to new workers—basically having pretend work take the place of real work.

Pohle writes: “In lieu of all that iterative work, companies are experimenting with new ways to build muscle memory. Some … have designed simulations to let junior staff practice asking clients for information or confronting a co-worker about a missed deadline. [Others are] blocking out time for workers to role play pitching to a customer, among other exercises.”

Mallory Barg Bulman, a senior director analyst at advisory firm Gartner, New York City, told Pohle: “Junior staff are really being asked to take ownership over complex decisions that require experience-based judgment that they don’t have.”

And a survey by the IBM Institute for Business Value reported about 45% of employees said AI was already eating away at their skills.

But maybe there is a bright side. As Ravi Kumar S., CEO of Cognizant, a worldwide technology services and consulting firm, told Pohle: “You don’t join entry-level to do entry-level tasks. It’s actually a positive that you’re suddenly a middle manager on day one of your first … job.”