AI tools can make short‑term onboarding and task execution easier, but when managers substitute tool access for human mentoring they degrade the tacit, long‑horizon knowledge that sustains organizational judgment and innovation. Over time, firms that economize on apprenticeship risk losing deep capabilities, institutional memory, and the ability to handle novel, non‑routine problems.
— This reframes AI adoption from a productivity trade‑off into a governance problem: preserving mentorship (and the tacit knowledge it transmits) is now a public‑policy and corporate‑strategy priority to avoid brittle institutions.
Eric Markowitz
2026.01.15
100% relevant
The newsletter’s main claim — “AI increasingly abstracts away the need for mentorship” and the Lou Simpson anecdote about osmosis learning — exemplifies the loss of apprenticeship the idea warns about.
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