The Turing Trap is turning into a Talent Trap: The wrong AI strategy could strand millions of skilled workers

The debate surrounding Artificial Intelligence's (AI) impact on our economy, society, and even survival highlights a deeper sense of loss of control. The prevailing assumption is that technology, not people, will determine AI's influence on work. To avoid dangerous self-fulfilling prophecies, leaders must recognize the twin traps ahead – the “Turing Trap” and the “Talent Trap”.

The Turing Trap is the misconception that the goal of AI should be to imitate humans, leading to the replacement of human workers. On the other hand, the Talent Trap is a flawed view of workers as a fixed amount of talent, primarily developed in schools. This perspective leads society to believe that companies win by securing a limited pool of talent rather than expanding it widely.

As AI achieves benchmarks on more cognitive tasks, these tasks and jobs may disappear, pushing humans into physically intensive tasks or new roles that require advanced degrees in emerging fields. The burden of adapting workers to an AI economy is placed primarily on schools, universities, and formal retraining programs.

However, human workers' potential is not fixed, and most learning occurs outside formal education. Job-relevant skills are best developed by working with others and tools to solve problems. Higher education plays a vital role, but employers' most important talent pipeline is the 10 million U.S. workers who transition into higher-paid, in-demand jobs annually, five times more than new college graduates.

The gateway jobs, accounting for 75% of job-to-job changes leading to higher pay, hold significant potential. Examples include customer service representatives becoming sales representatives or dispatchers. By building skills in lower-wage origin jobs and advancing them in gateway jobs, workers can thrive and expand the talent pool.

Research by Opportunity@Work and the Brookings Institution shows that half the opportunities for workers to transition into higher-paying roles are highly exposed to AI's growing capabilities. If employers adopt AI to automate tasks in gateway jobs, the impact will extend to those still aiming for those positions and to every employer utilizing the skills developed in these jobs.

To avoid the AI Talent Trap, business deployment of AI should aim to complement human talents to serve customers more deeply and innovatively. Employers should leverage frontline workers' tacit knowledge and potential, transforming administrative assistants into business workflow redesigners and medical assistants into patient engagement specialists. AI-augmented destination roles, like sales, can create a robust talent pipeline strategy.

Instead of fearing AI as the cause of large layoffs, businesses adopting AI to augment human skills can maintain headcount and see their stock rise. Regional industry networks can combine technology and talent to create agile workforces, new capabilities, and growing market shares. Core technology investments should shift from testing AI's ability to replace humans to assessing the efficacy of humans and AI working together.

Finally, new business models like metered augmentation can augment missing skills and challenge the Talent Trap's limitations.