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If AI is the future of work, why are we designing away people who do the work?

The business case for AI is efficiency. That usually means fewer jobs.

Dario Amodei, CEO of Anthropic, warned Axios that AI would lead to the “mass elimination of jobs across technology, finance, law, consulting and other white-collar roles, especially entry-level gigs.”

Noam Scheiber, from the New York Times, found that experienced workers aren’t safe either – companies are questioning the need for costly oversight when AI can make cheap labor more productive.

Whether we’re rookies or veterans, the financial incentive is clear: the organization will be leaner.

Traditionally, people grew into leadership by moving through roles that gave them critical on-the-ground experience. But today, those foundational roles are the first to be automated.

Are we eliminating the lived experience that feeds our leadership pipelines?

TaQuonda Hill, a senior information technology transformation leader, and I discussed the potential impact on succession planning and talent development.

The Irreplaceable Skills

Repetitive tasks have value. Flipping burgers, writing procedures, researching case law, or calming angry callers builds something more enduring than muscle memory. These experiences teach us how to lead.

Among the lessons:

Empathy. If you’ve done the job, you understand the people who still do it. It makes you more relatable — and more effective. Empathy is the foundation of connection.

Grasp of Implications & Context. You don’t know what you don’t know. But when you’ve done the work, you’re more likely to anticipate unintended consequences. Consider Boeing’s 737 Max crisis. Leadership outsourced critical engineering oversight for speed and savings. But without the institutional memory and technical fluency, they missed the risk. Tragic results followed.

As TaQuonda put it, “When you strip out the context, you gut the leadership pipeline. You might gain speed, but you lose the lived experience that turns managers into leaders.”

Team Development. People don’t scale. Teams do. And good teams are built by people who know how to work through complexity. One of my first summer jobs was at Burger King. A colleague made a point of slinging hot oil my way. It wasn’t fun. But it was formative. I learned to navigate conflict and win people over without authority.

As TaQuonda put it, “AI can make work transactional. But leadership isn’t transactional – it’s relational. If we raise a generation of leaders who’ve never had to influence, inspire, or navigate uncertainty, we’ll lose what makes them credible.”

Cultural Awareness and Navigation. Knowing what will and won’t work in a given organization takes experience. Call it politics if you want, but it’s how things get done. Being right isn’t enough. You have to understand the system you’re in, and how to move within it.

The fantasy is that tech will replace people. The reality is that it replaces undifferentiated effort. This leaves us with a greater need for people who can think, adapt, and scale others. Insight comes from experience, and we’re cutting the very roles that grow it.

The Risk of Outsourcing Potential

Traditionally, leadership was forged in the trenches: prioritizing under pressure, communicating across silos, and failing forward. Early-career roles weren’t glamorous, but they offered repetition, feedback, and the slow build of judgement.

If we are not careful, we’ll eliminate this development stage entirely. More than ever, leadership development must be intentional.

TaQuonda believes that “Leadership development needs to be treated like product development – intentional, resourced, and iterated. You can’t outsource wisdom.”

“Some organizations are building escalators – fast, effective AI-driven paths to decision making. But real leadership is built on stairs: deep skills, context, and ability to tell a story because you’ve lived it.”

And that’s the key. “Talent is currency,” TaQuonda adds. “But it’s not about what skills someone has – it’s about the impact they can deliver. That’s what leaders need to recognize and grow.”

What Great Organizations Are Doing

According to TaQuonda, we’re still learning where AI fits into our organizations. “It’s not Big Bang. It’s iterative. We start with buttons, not blueprints.” That means evolving not just the technology, but how we lead through change.

“We’re used to investing in tech labs to drive innovation,” she notes. “Maybe it’s time we invested in leadership labs to do the same for judgement, storytelling, and behavioral skills.” In this new model, learning isn’t confined to training sessions; it’s embedded in the work. “We don’t just train – we rotate, experiment, and test. You build it, you run it. That creates accountability.”

The Takeaway

It might look like we’re outsourcing our bench. In reality, we’re weakening our succession plans.

AI is here. But our future depends on human leaders.

We can outsource tasks. We can’t outsource wisdom.