Are you experienced? You'll be a big AI help

AI is working its way up the management hierarchy, starting at the bottom. But the more entry-level work it absorbs, the more valuable an unexpectedly scarce commodity may become: experience. Companies may need fewer junior managers to execute routine tasks. Yet, that makes people who already understand how organisations actually function - not how the process manual says they function - more important. The senior manager who knows why the Mumbai office closes deals differently from the Delhi one, which supplier requires cajoling and which 'temporary' workaround has been running since 2014, possesses something an algorithm cannot readily acquire from generic training data. It/he/her can certainly do with that know-how.

Employers with years under their belt may, therefore, find themselves at the forefront of the AI transition. They learnt to manage by performing routine organisational tasks that AI will increasingly perform. More importantly, they accumulated institutional knowledge produced by doing those jobs. As corporate leadership shifts from managing all-human workforces to orchestrating teams of humans and digital agents, these veterans can become the crucial interface between the two.

If AI removes some junior rungs, tomorrow's young managers will need to acquire domain knowledge differently, combining technical fluency with wider exposure to business processes. But companies face the opposite problem at the other end. They cannot manufacture 25 yrs of organisational memory overnight. The paradox of AI, then, may be that a tech associated with making older skills obsolete instead raises the premium on people who know where the (company's) bodies - and spreadsheets - are buried. Senior managers need not compete with AI at processing information. Their advantage lies in knowing the organisation sufficiently well to interrogate, contextualise and deploy it. Far from hastening retirement, AI could actually prolong senior managers' professional careers, turning experience from a depreciating asset into corporate infrastructure.