Robert Ta and a co-speaker explain why top performers resist training AI systems that could replace them, and how to fix it. They argue the productivity gains follow a J-curve, letting junior employees work at expert level. The solution: pay experts for their knowledge, attribute work to them, and frame training as a growth opportunity, not a threat.
There is one other nugget that I got from an executive who has ran teams of 3,000 to 4,000+ product managers, designers, engineers, and has been on the board of like Fortune 500, Fortune 1,000 companies. One of my mentors, Mike, he talks about this, which is we know that that's the thing to do, which is get the experts to compound their intelligence. We know that they're the A-players of the org. And then the question is, are we compensating them for that fairly? And I thought he brought up such a good point, which is if we're now we're asking these people to go out of their way to annotate the data and say that's part of the job, job stops changing. And hey, you have way more leverage by doing this thing, AKA I'm annotating these stories, I'm annotating these agent runs, I'm annotating the whatever to improve the harness. Now the harness has a multiplicative productivity J-curve effect on every employee in your org. You take that unicorn employee, you have them train the agent, and if their investment into that produces a J-curve sort of productivity multiplier for the rest of your org, aka a novice sort of product manager can come in and act as a staff-level PM. Like, you know, they're not going to have the same judgment quality or whatever, but they can come in there and be effective way more than the before world where you had to shadow for 6 to 12 months and then you're maybe effective. My opinion, hot take maybe, and the take of other seasoned tech executives is think about your incentive structure for that behavior that you want to compound that investment for the org, for this intelligence layer, the company brain. Are you incenting your A-players to be on the front lines to do that? That's a really critical thing that I think every exec should be thinking about. And if you aren't and they're not doing it, well then you haven't created the systems or the environment to encourage the behavior that you would like out of the org. And that's just full stop the issue. What's your take on that? Should experts be compensated for the compounding leverage that their time now gets by doing these activities, by doing the annotations, by doing the agent reviews?
Yeah, the world I like to see is one knowledge attribution, like say you're encoding expertise into a dataset and that's used to train prompts and agents that are used by other people. I mean, you can trace the attribution now that's really like ideally becomes kind of a knowledge marketplace where you get credit, you get attribution. The agent I helped train and did so many different tasks today, you know, like it did 100 tasks today. That's your leaderboard, right? You don't want Telke Maxing leaderboard. You want like, where is the knowledge attribution being used in context to provide company value leaderboard? That's how I like to see it.
I guess to put it really bluntly, this is why I think the incentives should align economically. If I am your A-player and if I do have a fear that my job security is threatened by training these agents so that lower-skilled PMs that are earlier in their careers could take these agents and be as effective as me. If I believe that, then what is my incentive to do that for you? And that's really meeting that objection. I think there are going to be people in orgs where the A-player, they see it and they're like, oh, I'm just drawn to this. I want impact. I want more leverage. I'll say when I've worked in corporate, I'm hungry for impact. Your A-players are hungry for impact. All I'm saying is there is going to be a percentage of those people that are smart, they're intelligent. Don't come to them and ignore the elephant in the room. They've thought this through. They're like, are you training my replacement? Replacement, right? Like, and just confront the elephant in the room and say like, here's what we think. The job profile is this way. This is a new responsibility. It is super impactful. And I believe it's every manager and executive's job to coach their team to see the vision that actually there's so much more leverage here. You can innovate so much more doing this. You could compound and help us all go faster. I think those are the things that execs and leaders need to be giving their teams a vision that is way more positive versus the doom and gloom of like, you're going to lose your job. We're going to like train an agent to fucking replace you. He's like, no, like your job is to get your A players to be activated on this. And then that is your advantage in market against the competition. Really exciting to see how this plays out. It is such an interesting era. And there's so many ways that we could talk about this and very like unlimited angles. But there's a lot we don't know because we just need time to happen and more experiments to happen across companies. But we'll definitely keep reporting on the progress of this.
