In a meritocracy, it’s practically a slur. But AI is reshaping the labor market faster than any of us anticipated — and I think it’s time to revisit the idea.
The pipeline is breaking
In February 2026, Citrini Research published a report that rattled U.S. markets. “The Global Intelligence Crisis” — a speculative post-mortem written from the perspective of June 2028. The premise isn’t that AI fails. It’s that AI succeeds.
Knowledge workers disappear en masse. The companies that depended on them collapse. The broader economy follows.
The early signs are already here. Law firms say they no longer need junior associates. Consulting firms are quietly eliminating the analyst roles that once built the foundation of every senior career. This isn’t just job displacement. The entry points into entire industries are closing.
Junior employees were never just cheap labor. They were the pipeline — how industries reproduced expertise across generations. That pipeline is now being quietly dismantled.
Who trains the next generation?
Young people today aren’t bad at AI. Many are exceptional at it. The problem is different.
To create real value with AI, you need to understand how industries actually work. How organizations function. Where customer value is really created — and where it’s destroyed. But the door is closing before they ever get a chance to learn.
Companies have no incentive to fix this. It’s faster and cheaper to hand AI tools to existing employees than to onboard someone new. Academia doesn’t know the shop floor.
There’s one group with every reason to solve this problem. Parents.
Time to redefine inheritance
Anyone with a decade or more in an industry carries something irreplaceable. Where the inefficiencies hide. Which processes exist for real reasons — and which ones nobody ever questioned. What customers actually want versus what they say they want.
AI can execute brilliantly. It cannot discover what it doesn’t know to look for.
“A broadcast industry veteran passed his knowledge to his daughter. She built an AI solution automating camera direction for large-scale live shows — and turned it into a service. He couldn’t have built it without her. She couldn’t have seen the opportunity without him.”
That’s the inheritance I’m talking about. Not money. Not connections. The ability to see where value is created — and where it’s waiting to be unlocked.
You’ve spent decades building that knowledge. Who are you passing it on to?