Your junior employees were the training ground. AI just removed it.
For years the messy first draft, the clumsy customer reply, the analysis that took too long, all of it looked inefficient.
But that was where judgment got built. Through small mistakes, unclear tasks, difficult customers, and watching experienced people make trade-offs in real time.
Now AI does that first layer. The draft is generated, the meeting summarized, the research compressed, the reply suggested.
Faster, cleaner, less waiting. On paper, pure progress.
But here is the question I keep raising with the leaders I work with: if AI removes the work that used to teach judgment, where does the next generation learn it?
Judgment does not arrive with a promotion. It is earned in the boring work we are now handing to machines.
So before we redesign productivity, we have to redesign learning with the same energy.
Otherwise we build organisations with more output today and fewer people who truly understand the work tomorrow.
What part of junior work taught YOU the most, and would a machine have let you skip it?