Raise the floor. Open the ceiling.

A shared vocabulary and training give everyone a place to start. Sharing today’s good workflows helps colleagues now; growing tomorrow’s experts requires decision practice, feedback, mentoring, and responsibility.

In practice

I give everyone the same floor: one real task, attempted, checked, redirected, with a way to ask for help. Then the learning moves into the day job. A colleague of mine could run the prompts I’d written but couldn’t repair them when they broke, and her questions turned out to be the best diagnostic I had for where the system was rough. Sitting beside someone while they change one thing teaches more than any library.

The tradeoff

The rote work that AI takes on was the work juniors learned on. Remove it and the path to the next expert disappears unless someone rebuilds it on purpose. That’s the obligation I see leaders miss most: mentorship, consequential choices with supervision, and feedback on reasoning, funded as deliberately as the tools were.

Go deeper

Raise the floor, then practice the craft in the field guide.