Why older workers are critical to AI adoption in the office

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Much of the concern about artificial intelligence displacing jobs has so far come from people who are at the junior end of the workforce. Some of this stems from the belief that AI benefits workers with greater task-based responsibilities versus the broader job responsibilities of higher-level workers (with many experts saying AI is nearly at the level of a good intern). Some stems from this population having more time left in the workforce — and from that perspective, more to lose as technology develops over time.

Still, 30% of senior-level employees fear they’ll be fired for lacking AI skills, according to a recent report from online tutoring company Preply. But is this worry realistic?

“To the extent people are eligible for retirement, if there is a big skills gap, you may find people who choose to retire or just find completely different work,” said Steve Preston, president and CEO at Goodwill Industries International, a leading nonprofit provider of educational and workforce-related services. But not everyone in senior positions falls in that camp, he says — nor do the companies that employ these people want them to quit.

“One of the most devastating forms of employee attrition is when you lose institutional knowledge and customer knowledge,” Preston said. “You absolutely want to retain those people, and you want to help them be more productive.”

Experienced employees can master AI insights

Despite the general stereotype that older workers (who often make up the senior-level echelon) have a harder time adapting to new technology, Preston recognizes that these are the workers for whom AI has unique advantages. “If a job requires engagement with AI, I actually think some older workers are going to be better able to leverage it to get insights,” he said, “both in terms of querying AI more effectively and in terms of getting the results of AI-supported work and being able to apply judgment to it.”

In other words, someone with a more complex understanding of the business is more effective at applying inputs and assessing outputs using knowledge and skills that AI has not mastered (at least not yet).

Jeetu Patel, executive vice president and general manager of security and collaboration at Cisco, says AI is not yet replacing whole, complex jobs, but rather tasks. “Over time, will it get good at doing jobs? Absolutely,” he said. “But no one really knows what the timeframe for that will be.”

For the senior-level workforce, Patel says the next few years will be more about augmentation versus any sort of displacement or replacement — given, of course, these workers are willing to meet their employers in the middle and enhance their hard and soft skills in the context of an AI-driven workplace.

As technology continues to advance, 57% of industry experts predict a surge in the demand for soft skills, according to a report from learning management system platform TalentLMS.

“Ultimately, every company is a collection of employees, which are all humans, and they need to be touched and motivated in a very human way,” said Nikhil Arora, CEO of Epignosis (parent company of TalentLMS). This is something senior management will have to bear in mind under a modern context as day-to-day roles across the employment architecture change.

Reverse mentoring need is high

Another strategy for higher-level workers to take into consideration, Arora says, is reverse mentoring, a process in which senior management seeks the perspective of less experienced employees. “A lot of young people who are basically growing up on AI, for them it’s second nature, where a lot of senior leaders perhaps are now learning AI. It’s almost upside down,” Arora said. He’s a big believer in always having two sets of mentors, “one who’s perhaps more seasoned than you, and one who’s much younger, because they are closer to the disruptive technologies and how the new age customers are going to behave.”

With younger workers as near-native AI users, creating seniority-agnostic mentorship could enable the organization to innovate at a much faster velocity than a top-down strategy. At this point, nearly half (47%) of employees say they still don’t use AI skills in their jobs, according to the 2024 State of Upskilling and Reskilling Report from TalentLMS and Workable. Meanwhile, half agree that their work would benefit from it. Some organizations are embarking on structured training journeys for members of their workforce and clientele (Goodwill, for example, received a portion of Google’s $75 million AI Opportunity Fund as a grant to spread AI training across the communities they serve).

Generative AI and automated hours

The reality is that nearly a third of hours worked in the U.S. could be automated by generative AI, potentially altering the way many business professionals — executives and senior managers included — do their work. Leaders at companies like IBM and Duolingo have been vocal about replacing some humans with AI.

In the race to AI, offloading the wrong people could have unintended consequences, like losing institutional knowledge that can operate in complex, interpersonal environments.

“It would be easy to write off older workers and say this is just going to be too hard for them, they’re not going to adapt,” Preston said. “Let’s lean into the value of AI to help leverage the jobs of the future for older workers, rather than assuming that for some reason, it’s going to leave them behind.”