By using AI to do entry-level work, companies are accidentally destroying the next generation of leaders.
April 16, 2026
Original Paper
The Judgment Vacuum: AI, Apprenticeship Collapse, and the Erosion of Organisational Governance Capacity
SSRN · 6526739
The Takeaway
The 'Judgment Vacuum' occurs when AI takes over the boring 'grunt work' usually done by juniors. This sounds efficient, but it destroys the 'apprenticeship pipeline' where humans gain the experience needed to eventually oversee the AI. If no one learns the basics because the AI does them, eventually there will be no one left who knows when the AI is making a catastrophic error. It’s a paradoxical loop: the more we rely on AI to save time, the less capable we become of knowing if that time was well-spent. For young workers, it means your 'foot in the door' is being replaced by an algorithm, leaving you with no way to climb the ladder.
From the abstract
Organisations are simultaneously expanding their reliance on artificial intelligence for strategic decision-making while reducing the entry-level roles through which governance judgment has traditionally been developed. This paper argues that these trends are causally linked, constituting a structurally self-undermining system in which AI adoption erodes the human judgment infrastructure required to govern it. Drawing on dynamic capabilities, tacit knowledge, absorptive capacity, and institution