Telecom & Technology Consulting
Any history of technology must include discussion of the unintended consequences of innovation. The so-called paperless office increased paper consumption. Email and texting caused employees to work more hours. Social media exposed us to privacy and security issues.
Inside IT departments, a different flavor of unintended consequences has reared its head: Adopting AI to increase efficiency and cut costs may eventually leave them without capable IT leadership in the pipeline. By replacing junior and entry-level IT roles with AI, enterprises will lack experienced leaders who understand how to handle complex technological and strategic challenges.
Many technology and management consultants recognize this problem. As a solution, they recommend that companies rethink how they hire, train, and mentor IT staff for the future. The last part is the key here – mentorship. The idea is to pair senior IT individuals with fresh talent, where they can collaborate to help budding programmers and engineers hone their skills – not just the tactical work, but also the ability to think about the big picture, and how technical solutions must align with business objectives.
This would always be a smart approach, but it’s more essential than ever. Traditionally, companies slowly expanded their IT expertise, where entry-level employees blossomed into tech leaders over time. But the demand for AI, and the automation it fosters, has caused new IT workers to miss out on critical skills.
That’s because an overreliance on AI leaves the potential to not notice bugs, system flaws, and security vulnerabilities that only skilled engineers can catch. AI can do a lot, and it will only increase its capabilities beyond what we can currently imagine. But AI can never fully replace the power of human critical thinking, as well as the domain knowledge that only comes from years in the IT trenches. This mindset is essential for both correcting current errors, and to proactively avoid future errors. Even more, experience is indispensible for spurring innovation as emerging technologies become more ubiquitous.
For example, software development means more than writing code. Senior people have gone through the trial and error, and the beta testing countless times for countless projects. They know what works, they know what will break, they can foresee what can scale and what might hinder the scaling. They understand how technical decisions can impact the bottom line. You can’t automate any of that experience.
AI can indeed speed up the process, but it won’t teach a new developer this thought process, as well as good judgment. With a formal mentorship program, companies will equip new tech talent with the requisite skills to become senior contributors in the future. Instead of merely producing, they’ll learn.
Organizations shouldn’t underestimate the issue of the decline in junior roles. While some may dismiss this as a trend in employment, it’s actually a long-term personnel problem that will have a measurable negative impact on the health of the business. In fact, technology leaders would be wise to treat the pipeline problem with a sense of urgency. They wouldn’t wait to resolve an infrastructure risk, so they shouldn’t wait to fix an upcoming dearth in potential leadership.
In that light, CIOs should view hiring new talent not as a matter of merely filling current openings, but as an investment in the future quality of the company’s products and systems. Assuring expert leadership down the road is based on the onboarding process, and intentionally developing new programmers and engineers starting on day one.
AI certainly has obvious advantages, but eliminating staff for the sake of short-term efficiency will eventually wreak havoc on the entire organization – potentially for years. When CIOs recognize this poor trade-off, they will mandate that leadership development is best executed with the use of seasoned mentors. Entry-level and junior staff will not only gain skills, they will – more importantly – learn how to lead the next crop of new talent.
