Adapted from The Gen Z AI Trap in The Forward View
The Analysis You Cannot Explain
I was interviewing candidates for a strategic analyst role at a Fortune 500 client. Twenty-three applicants, all under 26, all from top schools, all with ChatGPT in their toolkit. Not one could explain their own analysis when I asked follow-up questions.
Around the same time, a young founder who had raised a seed round asked me for advice. I asked him to walk me through his business model on a whiteboard, no tools. He could not. "I need my laptop," he said. "The AI has all my frameworks."
The AI had his frameworks. He did not.
Amplify or replace
After training 25,000 professionals at AI Guru, the pattern I keep seeing is simple. People who get stronger use AI to amplify expertise they already have. People who get weaker use it to replace expertise they never developed. From the outside the two look identical. Both produce polished work quickly.
An engineering student in Mumbai put the good version better than I can: we use AI to learn ten times faster, not to skip learning.
Why the second question works
This is why asking for the decision is built the way it is. Judgment cannot be assessed by asking someone about a system. It shows up when you ask for one specific call they personally made, and then ask again. People who did the work get quieter and more specific. People who stood next to it stay smooth, and their answers drift toward what the tool produced rather than what they decided.
The follow-up is the whole test. The first answer can be borrowed. The second one has to be owned.
The early seat
None of this is a character flaw in young engineers. They arrived when the tools could already write the essay and the analysis. The three seats name the real problem: early, the cheap years that used to train you are being automated. The queue of small, low-stakes work that built the people above them is going away, sometimes because they are the ones automating it.
The substitute is contact. Take some of the unglamorous work on purpose, by hand, while the stakes are still small. Then use the tools on top of what you built.
A test for anyone
Take your biggest piece of work from last month. Explain how you did it without mentioning any tool. Not the output: the calls. What you chose, what you checked by hand, where you were unsure.
If you can, the tools are working for you. If you cannot, the next person to ask you a follow-up question will find out before you do.
Adapted from The Gen Z AI Trap in The Forward View. Read the full issue.