What should employers be doing about the young people they hire in the age of generative AI?
If I had money for every time I’ve been invited to an AI summit (or meeting, or webinar, or conference), I might be able to go somewhere sunny when the Cape Town winter hits in a couple of months.
But a deluge of emails and invitations is the price I pay for turning myself into someone who “knows about generative AI”.
Occasionally, though, I do actually attend an AI-related event.
Which is how I found myself at a breakfast in central Cape Town on a beautiful Friday morning.
The breakfast, titled “Does AI require agencies to rethink their pricing, services and value?”, was organised by Dave Duarte (waiting list here: https://27th.co/ct), and was attended by people who work in the marketing and advertising space.
They gathered to think about the impact of generative AI on their businesses and pricing models. What emerged in the group discussion was something related but different: many participants were looking at an elephant in the room called “young people”. These were some of the concerns raised:
- If we get AI agents to do the entry-level jobs, do we still need to hire young people? If we don’t do that, what’s the long-term impact on business?
- The young people who are employed in entry-level positions often don’t know how to get good results out of AI tools – is it worth taking the time to train them?
- If you’ve been in the business for a long time, you have a wealth of acquired knowledge. If young people “just use AI” and don’t learn things in a concrete, real-world way, are they equipped to do their jobs? If not, how should that be tackled?
(One fascinating and semi-related question was also put on the table: are our AI bots and agents similar in nature to slaves? And if one looks at history – for instance the impact of the institution of slavery on the rise and fall of the Roman empire – what might this modern form of cheap labour be doing to us, or setting us up for? Memo to self: research this question!)
So, what about young people?
The questions raised in the workshop bear thinking about – and because I had been doing that, I followed the link when this headline appeared in a feed on my phone: Adults Lose Skills to AI. Children Never Build Them. | Psychology Today.
The article, by Tim Cook, focuses more on younger children and teenagers than the young people who were being talked about at the breakfast, but bear with me.
Essentially, Cook says people in general may (or may not) be becoming lazier or stupider through the use of AI. (Read my take on that: Is GenAI making us lazy? And other 3am questions.)
But, he writes, an age-related distinction needs to be made: “What AI does to a 45-year-old is likely categorically different than what it does to a 14-year-old.”
What, then, does AI do to a child vs an adult?
Cook says that adults audit the outputs they get from AI (they use their own judgement). But a child usually wouldn’t be able to do this because auditing requires the domain knowledge that the child is supposed to be developing. For instance, they can’t tell if a GenAI output about South Africa’s democratic transition is accurate and unbiased unless they’ve done prior learning about it – something my son did in every year of his primary school education, long before the existence of GenAI.
Cook’s disquieting conclusion:
An adult choosing to offload a task they understand is making a tradeoff between decreasing effort and increasing efficiency. The capacity to do that task independently exists. The choice is deliberate. The atrophy is (probably) recoverable. A child offloading a task they’ve never learned to perform is not making a choice. They are skipping a developmental step that was never developed. The capacity doesn’t exist yet. The foreclosure may be permanent – and because they have no independent baseline, they cannot recognize what they’re losing.
He says we need to protect the space that our children need so that they can develop their foundational skills – it’s a non-negotiable. I agree, but I was disappointed that he ended his article there. I’d have appreciated some ideas on how that might be done, even if only half-formed. I do know, though, that this is just one of the huge societal issues we face now. As is the question of the impact of GenAI on the lives of slightly older young people.
What about the Gen Zs?
I’d argue that Cook’s non-negotiable also applies to those entry-level juniors being talked about in the breakfast meeting.
Effective use of AI requires more than just the auditing that Tim Cook speaks about – it also requires the human at the keyboard to be functioning in a managerial role. You get the best results from AI by thinking of it as a tool (or a set of tools) which need to be deployed in systematic and thoughtful ways.
In my experience, as someone who was once 23, as a parent and as someone who managed people for many years, those kinds of leadership skills don’t happen overnight: they develop over time and as life experience is accrued.
Let’s assume a company has decided to continue hiring young people because they’ve thought it through and feel they need a succession plan that doesn’t involve AI chatbots taking over the C-suite in 10 years time. And let’s assume they want those young people to be using AI effectively.
They’re going to need patience and a planned commitment to training and conscious mentoring.
The first step in that plan: Gen AI is a way to get things done quickly and efficiently in the here and now and that requires training so that all staff members (not just the young ones) are on the same page. That means they know what tools they are allowed to use and what safe and responsible use looks like; they also have the same broad knowledge about getting effective outputs from GenAI tools.
But just as younger children might be missing out on crucial learning foundations, so too might junior staff be missing out on practical experience. They need to get their hands dirty, so to speak: whatever the business does, there should be a starting point at the level of doing things the “old-fashioned way”, without the help of GenAI.
In the long term, the development of staff members who can eventually run things on their own means the same it has always meant: individual attention.
In 2026, add GenAI management skills to your list of transferable knowledge and you are on the way to turning that elephant in the room into a group of people who can grow and develop into the people they can be.
Main picture: Hannah Stewart and Chierol Lai, Elephant in the Room (2017). Bronze resin sculpture for Queen Mary University of London. By Ragn27, Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)
Previous Sensible Guide articles
Is Gen AI making us lazy? And other 3am questions – We’re living through deep changes in the way we interact with technology. If you are worried that Gen AI is making you lazy, here are some ways to approach that…
A parent’s guide to Gen AI: 11 ways to help your offspring stay safe and learn stuff – I take my experience as the mother of a gamer to bring you a parent’s guide to AI.
AI and humanity – a mission statement – I’ve been thinking about AI and humanity for a while. Here are three things I think about how we humans can use AI to enhance our lives.
What about the jobs? Artificial intelligence and social responsibility – I use AI tools every day – and am starting to think about paying for one of them. Which leads me to wonder about artificial intelligence companies and social responsibility.
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