By: Jay Kt
Much of the conversation around artificial intelligence focuses on jobs. Which roles will be automated? Which industries will be disrupted?
For strategist and consultant Georg Meyer, a more important question is emerging: if AI handles more of the work that traditionally helped people gain experience, how will businesses develop future experts, leaders, and innovators?
According to Meyer, expertise has always been built through effort, curiosity, and hands-on problem-solving. While AI can provide answers instantly, it cannot replace the learning that comes from working through challenges yourself.
“People have to want to solve problems beyond prompting AI,” Meyer says. “Expertise is hard-earned through repeated effort and deliberate practice.”
Meyer believes this process begins long before someone enters the workforce. Whether it is learning practical skills, solving difficult problems, building technology, or exploring ideas independently, people need opportunities to struggle, experiment, and discover solutions on their own.
Businesses can help cultivate these skills by ensuring employees gain firsthand experience with the work they support. Meyer recalls that when he worked at Caribou Coffee, every employee spent time working as a barista regardless of their position. That experience helped employees better understand customers and the business itself. As a software developer, it allowed him to build better solutions because he understood the people using them.
AI is making tremendous strides daily with its capabilities and accessibility. Meyer believes competitive advantage will increasingly come from qualities technology cannot easily replicate.
“If all our competitors have access to the same AI and can get the same answers, businesses need to ask what their people can do that cannot be done elsewhere,” he says.
With AI being so common in today’s workforce, employers are changing the skills they value. Meyer expects critical thinking, independent judgment, creativity, and first-principles reasoning to become key attributes in employees as AI handles the more mundane tasks.
Meyer also believes that timeless human skills will become even more valuable. AI cannot build trust, develop relationships, mentor others, or acquire the skills needed to close a deal, all of which remain critical to business success.
Looking further ahead, Meyer worries less about AI becoming smarter than humans and more about humans becoming overly dependent on AI. As technology makes answers easier to obtain, people may lose some of their motivation to think independently, losing the joy of finding answers for themselves.
“What concerns me is that AI makes it too easy to get answers,” Meyer says.
AI will continue to advance and become more ingrained in our lives. The bigger question is whether people will continue to develop the curiosity, expertise, and problem-solving abilities that drive innovation in the first place.
