June 8, 2026
That chain broke this summer
For about 4,000 years, the same thing happened.
Senior person does the work. Junior person watches. Junior person tries. Gets it wrong. Gets yelled at. Tries again. Gets it less wrong. Repeats for years until one day the junior person becomes the senior person.
Apprenticeship.
Nobody designed it. Nobody optimized it. It just worked. Messy, slow, full of bad mentors and wasted years, but it worked.
It broke this summer.
Junior people now use AI for everything. The memo looks right. The analysis sounds right. The manager reads it, nods, moves on. Nobody corrects anything because there's nothing to correct on the surface.
But the junior isn't learning anything from it. They're copying an answer they can't evaluate, and nobody inside the building notices.
And the senior managers figured something out too. Why send work to an intern who might cry or mess it up when the AI does it faster, better, and doesn't need feedback?
So the junior pretends to know. The senior stops teaching. And the thing that transferred knowledge for 4,000 years just... stopped.
Ethan Mollick called it directly: "That mentorship just snapped this summer."
Snapped.
Now think about your company 5 years from now. You'll have a building full of people who are very good at using AI tools. And nobody who understands why the tool's answer is wrong when it's wrong.
People will call it a tech problem. Underneath, it's a "we forgot to build the next generation" problem. And by the time you notice, you're already 3 years behind.
The companies getting this right aren't waiting for it to fix itself. They're designing the apprenticeship on purpose, with AI inside it, not instead of it.
You describe the juniors and the seniors in your company and what's happening between them now versus two years ago. I tell you what the apprenticeship-with-AI-inside-it version looks like in your specific operation.
PD: HR didn't break this and HR can't fix it. This is a decision about what kind of company you're building. Yours to make.