The coaching loop AI could strengthen
Most of the debate about AI and junior employees has the causation backwards.
The worry I hear most often is that AI will hollow out entry-level work, and with it the apprenticeship that builds judgement. I understand the concern, because apprenticeship is how most of us actually learnt our trade, and the jobs that launched our careers genuinely are changing shape.
Yet that framing assumes something that was rarely true before AI: that junior staff were receiving consistent, personalised coaching from their managers. They were not. Most managers are too stretched to develop their people properly, and we have quietly normalised that gap for decades, treating coaching as the first thing to cut when the week gets busy because its cost stays invisible until a generation of leaders fails to materialise.
A case study doing the rounds this week puts the real problem in focus. A 23-year-old product manager at a US software company was producing polished, AI-generated fifteen-page documents his manager could not use, because his execution speed had outrun his judgement. The fix was not less AI. It was a coaching layer built into the AI itself, trained on around a hundred transcripts of his manager's actual feedback, that refuses to execute until he can explain what he is solving and why, and only shifts into fast production mode once that judgement has been demonstrated. Fourteen months on, he carries the equivalent of three years of experience.
The lesson generalises well beyond one product team. AI does not remove the need for judgement; it removes the excuse for skipping the step where judgement gets built. The constraint on developing junior people was never willingness but capacity, and capacity is precisely what AI now supplies, if we point it at the loop instead of around it.
The organisations that come out ahead will not be the ones that used AI to skip the feedback loop between junior staff and expectations. They will be the ones that used it to compress that loop, and they will out-develop everyone else.
The Supercompanies piece this draws on: https://lnkd.in/gakSv9JJ
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