Most corporations are adopting AI as fast as they’ll find uses for it. They’re writing emails and other business documents quickly, conducting efficient market research and finding other ways to spice up productivity. Sadly, some are using it to cut back or replace junior positions, operating under the idea that current employees will fill the productivity gap with AI — and that’s a mistake.
AI might be used as a tremendous productivity tool across all levels of a business. Giving all employees access to this powerhouse technology can have significant advantages, but it surely’s not a alternative for workers. It could be tempting to interchange junior staff with AI, and which may assist in the short-term, but it could have dire long-term consequences. Without junior staff who train, learn and move up, we could possibly be severely depleting our talent pool.
Experience over technology
As a real-world illustration, let me let you know about one in all my company’s current vice presidents, in our sales organization. He possesses a robust combination of technical expertise and eloquence. He understands methods to interact with prospects at any stage of the customer’s journey. He can expertly communicate about a distinct segment technical subject. And he didn’t gain these skills by asking an AI chatbot.
After graduating from college, he became a business development representative (BDR) at a tech company. That is an entry-level position that involves organising meetings for account executives and constructing a sales pipeline.
That is one in all the roles that has been impacted by AI. 6sense’s State of the BDR 2025 Research Report revealed that 70% of BDRs who’re using AI at work imagine this makes them more productive. BDRs must do quite a lot of groundwork, akin to cold outreach, researching accounts, following up on inbound leads, qualifying recent prospects and interacting with prospects who attend events. A lot of these tasks might be automated.
After 11 months as BDR, this vp was promoted to account executive after which moved as much as a director-level role. He’s now a vp in control of the business and enterprise sales team. His experience on the front lines from his first, entry-level job has shaped his current role. He knows firsthand what it takes to achieve these junior sales positions and methods to interact with prospects and construct a pipeline. He’s also been an account executive, so he understands methods to construct customer relationships no matter a business’s size. The concept of on-the-job learning applies to anyone holding a senior position; attending to the upper rungs of the ladder requires first getting your hands dirty in the small print of the role, failing and succeeding.
Employees in any position and at any level can increase their productivity through the use of AI. Organizations should find ways to enable their staff to be more productive, but in the event that they use it to interchange junior positions with AI, they’re forfeiting their future talent pool in exchange for short-term financial gains.
To further illustrate this point, let’s have a look at an actual example based on a moderately boring but mandatory topic: spreadsheets.
Technology enhanced by experience
For many corporations today, achieving their goals requires benefiting from their resources, and the most precious of those is time.
I recently asked our head of individuals and culture to create a corporation map that outlines how employees at different levels of every organization should allocate their time. This includes clarity about how employees at different levels of our organizational hierarchy should spend their time — e.g., how much time individual contributors, managers, directors and VPs should spend on tactical projects versus strategic projects.
Slightly than creating this spreadsheet from scratch, we used AI. I gave ChatGPT a three-sentence prompt, and it created a table that was 80% perfect. Then the magic happened: our expert drew on her deep HR expertise to make it 100% perfect. Her story is similar because the aforementioned sales leader — having worked in HR for well over a decade, she had the abilities to adapt ChatGPT’s general framework to my company’s specific context and make the table immediately usable. The subsequent day, I used this table to reply an worker’s query about what he needed to do to get a promotion.
Before the appearance of generative AI, creating this type of table would have taken days, with multiple iterations and deprioritizing other projects. With AI, it took minutes. AI created a table that was 80% usable, but it surely was our experienced head of individuals and culture’s real-world expertise that took it the ultimate 20% of the best way. That looks like a minority position, but that final 20% is what took the project from good to great.
AI to reinforce, not replace, employees
The abilities and knowledge needed to take that table to the finish line are gained through experience and dealing one’s way up through the ranks. Junior roles provide you with critical problem-solving skills — in addition to the prospect to make mistakes that shape your vision and pursuit of success.
If corporations replace junior positions with AI, how will people ever develop into experts? What’s going to occur when the present crop of leaders takes jobs with other corporations, develop into consultants or retire? Who’s next up with all of your institutional knowledge and culture? You would like a pipeline of talent waiting within the wings when the inevitable happens.
AI is now available for staff in any respect levels to profit from – but there won’t ever be an alternative choice to experience-based learning. As an alternative of wondering how AI can reduce staff numbers, business leaders should take into consideration methods to use AI to more quickly develop their talent pool. It’s not humans vs. AI — it’s humans plus AI.
