We talk a lot about how AI will change tasks. But what about how it changes learning?
What happens to career development when AI starts doing the work we used to learn from?
Since then, I’ve been reflecting on two very different signals. One comes from Tobi Lütke, CEO of Shopify, who shared that teams now need to prove AI can’t do the work before hiring someone. It positions AI as a replacement for human labor. The other comes from the AI Labor Playbook by Dr. Jules White, Director of Vanderbilt’s Initiative on the Future of Learning & Generative AI, which offers a more hopeful vision:
"When AI labor is used to empower, not replace, it becomes a catalyst for creativity, autonomy, and organizational excellence."That’s the vision I believe in.
But it won’t happen by default. Companies that want to use AI to enhance people, not replace them, need to build that into their culture early: not just through tools and training, but through the trust that people are still core to the company's future. In the short term, investors may push for cost and headcount efficiency, and it will look like progress. But in the long term, the real advantage will belong to companies that bet on both people and AI. I believe the companies that will thrive with AI will be the ones that never stopped investing in people.
*To be fair, 95% of Tobi's memo aligns with the same vision of building AI into how teams learn, work, and grow. The exception around headcount just happened to generate headlines.
Also, What happens to career development when AI starts doing the work we used to learn from?
It’s one of many questions I’ve been exploring as I think through how AI is changing the nature of work - not just the tasks we do, but how people develop, gain judgment, and become leaders. We’ve seen major tech shifts before - internet, mobile - and they transformed productivity. But the structure of work and career paths stayed mostly intact.
AI feels different. AI will make many workflows faster. The kind of work people used to start with - spreadsheets, drafts, research, grunt work - is exactly what AI is best at automating. Tasks that used to take a junior team hours might now take seconds.
As a result, many junior and even mid-level roles may disappear entirely. For the roles that do remain, AI will make workflows faster, but won’t build the same depth of understanding. Apprenticeship has always been about learning by doing real work alongside experienced people - struggling, observing, absorbing nuance. That’s how judgment is built. It’s a model that spans industries: finance, law, medicine, and more.
So what happens when the work that teaches you how to work disappears? That’s how we lose the hands-on phase of a career - the part where real skills and judgment are developed. We talk a lot about how AI will change tasks. But what about how it changes learning?
