AI is making young professionals more efficient, but possibly less capable. The tasks we’re now outsourcing to AI are often the same tasks that build judgement, critical thinking and expertise in the first place.
Mistakes are precious. Keep making them
You’re early in your career. You’re getting AI to write your emails and reports, prepare summaries and conduct analysis. This is what AI is competent at.
Your employer is probably encouraging you to do this. But your employer has enjoyed the benefit of decades of experience in performing these tasks. This brain exercise has developed in them a quality that’s vital in effective leaders: sound judgement.
If you too want to develop sound judgement, you need to exercise your brain. You will do this by writing emails and reports, preparing summaries and conducting analysis. It will take you longer. But in the process you will make precious mistakes; precious because they’re irreplaceable learning opportunities.
If there’s a task that you haven’t yet mastered, master it before getting AI to do it. If you don’t, AI is mastering you. You’ve become an AI slave.
The result will be that, in the future, when you’re called upon to make critical judgement calls in a complex decision-making environment, you’ll make much more consequential mistakes. You spent too much time training the AI brain while neglecting your own.
And then, why would anyone hire you? AI is so much cheaper.