Your most experienced people are your biggest AI risk.
Not because they’ll be replaced.
Because they’re quietly borrowing competence they’re no longer building.
The sysadmin who used to sit with a fault for an hour, reading logs, building a mental model — now describes the problem to an AI and follows the diagnostic path it gives him. Faster. Cleaner. His manager thinks he’s at peak performance.
What the manager can’t see is the rate at which he’s stopped doing the cognitive work that built that performance in the first place.
This is the borrowed competence problem. And the research — from aviation, medicine, and white-collar professional services — shows it accumulates fastest in the people you trust most.
