In the rush to automate, many businesses are overlooking a crucial question: What happens when we remove the very tasks that build expertise, resilience, and real problem-solving skills?
Spoiler alert—it’s not great. We risk creating a workforce of the future that’s adept at pushing buttons but stumbles when asked to think critically. To make your AI adoption strategy succeed, focus less on the tools and more on the people using them.
Traditional AI Adoption Strategies Might Be Making Us Dumb
AI is amazing for automating repetitive tasks. The catch is that those “grunt work” tasks are precisely where expertise actually develops. And the science is pretty clear.
- Repetition Builds Expertise: Neuroscience tells us that repetition creates myelin, the substance that makes neural pathways stronger and faster (The Talent Code, anyone?). Automating these tasks could mean fewer chances for employees to build the muscle memory they’ll need for mastery.
- Tacit Knowledge Takes Time: Those little “aha” moments—the tricks of the trade that only experience can teach—come from doing, not delegating. Skip this stage, and you’re left with surface-level competence, not deep expertise.
- Over-Reliance Is Risky: AI is brilliant at crunching numbers, analyzing data, and giving you answers. But will your team know what to do when (not if) the unexpected happens? Autopilot is pretty great at flying the plane but there’s no way I’m flying with an airline whose pilots only know how fly when autopilot is functioning as it should!
The Risk of Expertise Gaps in the Age of AI
When the foundational learning stage disappears, it leaves a generational expertise gap. That’s not just bad for individual careers; it’s bad for business.
Handing someone an AI tool doesn’t make them an expert. Without learning the basics, they won’t know what questions to ask, what assumptions to challenge, or how to adapt when the AI gets it wrong (and trust me, it will).
I experienced this personally in 2022, working with a brilliant young marketer whose addiction to automation was resulting in mediocre output, well below her abilities. A simple tweak to how AI was integrated into her workflows unleashed higher productivity and much better quality of work. That simple tweak is now at the heart of all our AI coaching and mentoring services.
Steps to Future-Proof Your Workforce
Ironically, the solution lies in bringing people back into the process.
Invest in Coaching and Mentoring:
- Why It Works: Learning directly from experienced professionals ensures your team gets the skills and insights they can’t Google. Plus, mentors pass on those intangible lessons that AI will never understand—like how to navigate complex client dynamics or recover from a misstep.
- Bonus Effect: Coaching doesn’t just upskill people; it keeps them engaged. Mentored employees are 50% more likely to stick around (Mentorloop).
- Example: A client was struggling with the idea of his marketing coordinator relying on AI to develop highly technical content, and with good reason. But the restrictive approach was demotivating. With coaching around how to leverage AI to save time without losing the company’s unique voice and expertise, we were able to develop a win-win process that addressed the owner’s fears while also increasing the productivity of the team.
Leverage Fractional Talent for Affordable Expertise:
- Why It Works: When hiring full-time leaders is out of reach, bringing in fractional talent—professionals who provide part-time expertise—can fill the gap.
- Bonus Effect: For a similar cost to one full-time hire, you can access specialized expertise in different areas – building a leadership bench that really moves the needle.
- Example: A client I worked with built a personal advisory team to completely rebuild their growth engine that included both fractional marketing and fractional sales leadership. Because we both brought complementary expertise, our collaborations sparked new ideas, amplified the ROI and accelerated the time to implementation.
Build Structured Workforce Development Programs:
- Why It Works: When you intentionally pair hands-on experience with AI tools with real-world problem-solving exercises, your team learns by doing—a key element of developing real expertise.
- Bonus Effect: You retain all the advantages of “they way we’ve always done it” while also benefiting from the kind of innovative thinking and fresh approaches that make it possible to leapfrog your competition, literally overnight.
- Example: This one’s personal. Earlier this year, I completed an Applied AI Mastery (Advanced) certification. For nearly 5 months, I spent 10 hours a week both learning new skills (how to click the buttons) with “homework” applying the skill to my actual day to day practise. Result? A reimagined service model that delivers more value for my clients & all-new, AI-based workforce development programs.
Tips to Balance AI and Human Development
So what can you do to ensure you business not only survives, but thrives in the age of AI?
- Don’t Ignore AI: The age of AI is here, and it is accelerating the pace of change almost beyond comprehension. If you don’t ride the wave, it WILL crush you.
- Don’t Automate Everything: Use AI for efficiency, but make sure key activities include enough hands-on work for employees to build their skills. It’s like letting your kid use a calculator—great for homework, not so great if they never learn basic math.
- Take a People First Approach: AI works best as a collaborator, not a crutch. For instance, let it handle the number crunching and repetitive analysis while employees interpret the results, ask questions, and make decisions.
- Embrace Healthy Skepticism: AI cannot differentiate between truth and lies, fact and fiction. It simply consumes data and spits it back out at you. The responsibility is on you to make sure that output is valid – a step I like to call ‘Trust, And Verify’.
- Make Coaching a Cultural Value: Encourage senior team members to mentor. It’s not just good for the mentees—it builds leadership skills in your veterans, too. And those veterans – they might appreciate a bit of AI coaching themselves!
Your AI Adoption Strategy—The Path Forward
Let’s stop pretending AI is a magic wand that solves every problem. If you want your AI adoption strategy to succeed, make it about empowering your people. Invest in their growth, pair them with mentors, and teach them to work with AI, not blindly follow it.
The result? A workforce that’s smarter, more adaptable, and ready for anything the future throws at them. Now that’s a strategy worth betting on.
Ready to take your AI adoption strategy to the next level?
Let’s talk about how coaching, mentoring, and fractional talent can transform your workforce. Book a Growth GPS Call to learn how you can build a human-centric AI adoption strategy.
Recommended Reading
For more on this topic, check out:
- The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle – Amazon
- The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains by Nicholas Carr – Amazon
- “How AI Will Change Work” – Harvard Business Review (Read Here)
- “AI and the Future of Work: The Critical Role of Human Skills” – MIT Sloan Management Review (Read Here)
- AI Superpowers by Kai-Fu Lee – Amazon
