AI Ate the Grunt Work. Now Employers Are Staging Pretend Work So Rookies Can Still Get Their Reps

Here’s a first-year associate’s new job: judge a contract she never learned to write. The reps that used to teach rookies — draft after draft, code written over and over, reams of corporate tax returns — got automated or restructured away, and the Journal’s Exchange cover this weekend has a name for what’s left. Gartner (IT) coined it: experience starvation. Its analyst Mallory Barg Bulman describes juniors handed decisions that call for judgment they haven’t had the chance to build. The backdrop is unkind: recent-grad unemployment was 5.7% in June, near a five-year high per the New York Fed, and entry-level roles in AI-exposed fields are shrinking fastest, per the Stanford Digital Economy Lab and ADP (ADP) Research.

So companies are manufacturing the muscle memory instead. EY built simulations where the AI plays a client who won’t accept a recommendation, and staff get real-time feedback on how they handle the objections. Cisco Systems (CSCO) sets aside time for staff to rehearse a customer pitch. Cognizant (CTSH) launched a 12-week boot camp this year — most of its 1,500 entry-level U.S. hires start there — and added an AI tool called Skillspring that breaks each role into tasks and builds a plan around the gaps. CEO Ravi Kumar S. calls being a middle manager on Day 1 a positive. “You don’t join entry-level to do entry-level tasks,” he told the Journal. At A&O Shearman, partner Daren Orzechowski says senior lawyers who once walked juniors through a draft memo now just as often walk them through the prompt.

The surgeons saw it first

Matt Beane at UC Santa Barbara studied surgical residents after robots took over much of the precision cutting: their hands-on practice fell by a factor of 10 to 20. The ones who thrived broke protocol — switching to departments without robotic arms or logging hundreds of extra simulator hours, what Beane calls shadow learning — and he’s since seen the same pattern in banking, startups and now AI. Rehearsal does seem to help: when a Stanford Law School lab ran a negotiation simulator with Dechert summer associates, three of the four finalists in the summer-end mock negotiation came from the group that spent two hours a week sparring with AI agents playing M&A lawyers — though executive director Megan Ma cautions it’s a small group and no substitute for learning by doing. Workers feel the drift: in an IBM Institute for Business Value survey of 8,800 employees, 52% said their daily tasks changed in the past year and about 45% said AI was already wearing down their skills.

Our read

Human capital is most people’s biggest asset. For a 25-year-old, the decades of earnings ahead dwarf anything in a brokerage account, and that asset compounds on skill the way a portfolio compounds on time — which makes this a cash-flow (M5) and time-value (M3) story, not a tech story. The grunt work was never the point; it was the tuition. If a graduate is launching from your household, budget for the reps the employer no longer provides — certifications, a mentor, simulator hours, even a role that pays less and teaches more — and plan a longer runway than recent graduating classes needed.

Owners, the same math runs in reverse: training is now a real line item, and the firms in the story pay it on purpose. Beane’s residents supply the behavioral note — the ones who got ahead went and found their reps rather than waiting to be handed them. That’s worth a family conversation before the offer letter arrives; fifteen minutes with the household cash flow will tell you how long the runway really is.