AI's Impact on Human Resources (Hiring, Learning and Development)

AI Isn’t Coming For Your Job; It Wants Your Kid’s Job Instead

Somewhere between one-half and two-thirds of small businesses have already begun to utilize AI.

While mass job replacement is still highly speculative, that doesn’t mean that the technology won’t upend our businesses. 

In this article, I want to discuss some of the potential risks we face as we continue to adopt AI. 

Here are the main points:

1. AI is shooting a hole in your organizational chart
2. AI will make it more difficult to hire junior employees
3. AI will transform the way we educate young people

AI’s Short-Term Benefits Mask Future Challenges

At the moment, most AI use is replacing basic tasks done by higher-value roles or replacing the need for entry-level positions.

So, for most people reading this, your job should be fine.

In fact, if you are a business owner who embraces AI,  then your role will likely become even more valuable, because you possess the hybrid ability to understand AI and also how to appropriately place it in the context of your existing decision-making framework. If AI shoots back slop, you can sanity check it because you have trained your mind to spot accuracy through years of repetition.

But what do we say about younger generations of workers? Indeed, analysts are seeing signs of softening in the labor market that is concentrated among its youngest members. Perhaps some of the tasks that you hired an analyst for in the past, can now be done with automation software.

So today, you can get along with fewer new hires. Eventually, the majority of the tasks performed by a junior-level employee might be performed by AI. 

This presents a host of challenges, but let’s stay focused on the problem of organizational development. 

As we said above, your a priori knowledge base allows you to prompt the model for the best results. You are like a master carpenter from a century ago who finally got hold of power tools. Your personal efficiency scales. 

But now think of the person who has your job in 5-20 years. How did they get there? Did they have the chance to take their lumps as a junior analyst? Depending on the role, they may never have received the chance because you didn’t hire them when they were you, electing for AI efficiency instead. 

It’s like when Marty goes back to 1955 in Back to the Future and meddles in his parents’ courtship, only to see the photo of himself disintegrate as his timeline is disrupted.  

Your future mid-level manager can’t even use AI because they don’t have the native understanding of the underlying currency. 

Automation only works if you know what to automate. 

I fear that we are going to raise a generation of workers who don’t know the underlying action.

How to Hire for an AI Future? 

Let’s suppose you have transitioned to a hybrid-AI model where your native experts can harness the power of automation to make themselves more efficient. 

But how do you hire to replace your native experts? 

One path is to look for junior people who have experience using AI. Software companies have always recruited from college-campus coders. Perhaps you’ll start to look for recent graduates with AI skills in their bag. 

But again, what are they using AI to do? And how will they know it’s working if they never developed the underlying experience from which to judge success?

An alternative path would be to hire them to learn the old-fashioned way so they can build the muscle that AI can exploit and scale. 

But given the snail’s pace of “old-fashioned” experience, do you really expect to hire young people to learn something slowly when you can automate the process directly? 

Here, businesses have a collective action problem. Everyone needs skilled workers, but few can benefit directly from investing in training and development.

A New Educational Paradigm?

AI’s impact on education can not be overstated.

Many have worried about young people who skip the hard work of processing information and just jump to the “answer” via ChatGPT or other tools. 

But there is this other macro problem we just discussed. Changes in the way we work will change our hiring and the type of skills we want people to have when they enter the workforce. The collective action problem we identified might best be addressed by a third party that can spend the time preparing young people for both the use of AI tools and the underlying process they seek to automate. 

For example, a lot of CPA work will be able to be done via AI. But if the CPA firms aren’t hiring junior CPAs, then someone has to pick up the slack in that training.

Whereas it used to be that some of that training came “on the job,” perhaps universities will have longer timelines that include a deeper practicum experience in the execution of the thing and not just the theory. Perhaps, four years should be extended to six to seven years so that the young CPAs can do the manual work they need to learn, so they can eventually automate it with reason and critical thinking. 

Of course, this presents two new challenges. A practical one is that the same young person using AI to write their college essay is probably going to use AI to get through any “practicum” addendum to their college experience, thus undercutting the project. Secondly, we have another problem of exploding college debt in this country. Do we really want to tack on a few more years and hundreds of thousands of dollars in debt so young people can learn to do things the way we did when we were kids? 

Conclusion

This might be the least satisfying essay I've written. 

There really are no easy answers here. 

But one thing I do know is that every action creates a reaction. Your investment in AI today can cause problems in the future. How do we prepare for today and tomorrow’s problems? That’s the act of strategic planning. 

If these are your problems, let’s get on the phone and wrestle with them together and hopefully come up with a strategy that considers these outcomes. 

Finally, a lot of my thinking has been shaped by conversations I have had with Paul Hanges, CEO of JibJab. Paul and I will be discussing this very topic on an upcoming Kasvaa webinar.