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Key Takeaways Automate mechanical tasks, but protect judgment-building work that develops future leaders.
AI should accelerate learning by shifting juniors toward analysis, evaluation and decision-making.
Have you ever thought about what happens to your company when you stop teaching people how to think?
I keep coming back to that question as more teams hand entry-level work to generative AI. Yes, the output still shows up. The spreadsheet is still built. The dashboard still updates on time. And yes, on paper, productivity looks better than ever.
However, the quiet cost sits somewhere else. The junior employees who used to earn their judgment through that work are not getting the same reps. They are not wrestling with messy inputs anymore. They are not making the kinds of small mistakes that create instinct. They are not getting coached through the blind spots that turn “smart” into “reliable.”
When I look at the A-players on my own teams, they did not become great by avoiding mistakes and foundational work. They became great because they did it anyway, got feedback, did it again and learned from real people’s experiences. If you remove that path entirely, you create a dangerous kind of organizational short-sightedness. The knowledge may live inside systems and prompts, but fewer people are learning how to produce it, challenge it and pass it on.
This is not an argument against AI. It is an argument for using it with intent.
The work that teaches judgment is not the same as the work that wastes time
A lot of entry-level tasks take time. They are repetitive. They often sit at the bottom of a process. Leaders see that stack and instantly think, “Automate it.”
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