# AI is breaking the apprenticeship path into expertise

Markdown copy of https://realalpha.app/s/ai-is-breaking-the-apprenticeship-path-into-expertise/ on Real Alpha, the best minutes from long interviews with the people building AI. Cite and link the page, not this copy.

- Speaker: [Ethan Mollick](https://realalpha.app/people/ethan-mollick/) · Ethan Mollick is a Wharton professor of entrepreneurship and innovation and co-director of its Generative AI Labs.
- Host: [Marina Mogilko](https://realalpha.app/people/marina-mogilko/) · Host, Silicon Valley Girl · Co-founded LinguaTrip and built Linguamarina, an English-learning YouTube channel with almost 9M subscribers.
- Show: Silicon Valley Girl
- Episode: [Wharton’s Top AI Professor: Stop Starting Software Companies — The Real AI Money Is Here](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/), Nov 3, 2026
- Moment: 18:24 to 22:22 of the episode (4 min), playing on https://realalpha.app/s/ai-is-breaking-the-apprenticeship-path-into-expertise/; the episode from there: https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1104

## Quote

> “your incentives are 100% **deliver the best product** you can. Who's better than you? Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini.”
> — [Ethan Mollick](https://realalpha.app/people/ethan-mollick/) at [20:03](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1203) · Silicon Valley Girl

## Takeaways

1. Junior workers can pass off AI output without understanding it.
2. Managers may choose AI over giving feedback to junior staff.
3. Organizations may need to make training a formal part of jobs.

## About this segment

Ethan Mollick explains how AI lets junior workers deliver polished work without learning the underlying craft. Employers may need to deliberately make room for training and inefficiency.

From “Wharton’s Top AI Professor: Stop Starting Software Companies — The Real AI Money Is Here”, Nov 3, 2026. [Watch the full episode](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/)

## Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

[18:37](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1117) And it's so interesting when I think about elegance and taste and judgment, it feels like people who have experience in the field are better positioned to learn that versus someone who's just starting out. Instead of getting time to learn basic things, they need to go straight into judgment, straight into taste. Is that how the market is progressing with AI? There's a couple things happening at one time, sort of, when you think about markets and education, right?

[18:59](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1139) So, first of all, we are temporarily in a crisis in universities. I mean, we're always in a crisis in universities, so this is not new. Anyone who's been in education knows this. But we are in a temporary AI crisis, right? And we already kind of know the outlines of that solution, which is AI is an incredibly good tutor when used as a tutor. And it's very bad if you're just cheating and getting answers from it.

[19:18](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1158) Even if you think you're learning, you're not, right? So, eventually, we'll have AI tutors outside of class. Inside of class, we'll do more action learning. I mean, if you've been to a business school, law school, you've already done these kind of case studies and discussions and activities and, you know, we'll do in-class tests. We'll figure it out. The real problem is where people actually have developed taste and judgment is in the world, right?

[19:38](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1178) And we had this great deal for the last few thousand years, which I would send you, you know, a newly trained recruit who didn't know anything. And we had apprenticeship, right? That's how the last 4,000 years of white-collar training have operated. So you'd get a really junior person who is desperate to show you they were good. They worked for cheap because they wanted to move up the rungs, and they would do the work that a middle manager didn't want to do.

[19:58](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1198) And in return, they would get a little bit of pay, they'd get to show off their stuff, and they'd learn the ropes. And the middle manager would get their work passed off to somebody who could at least do some of the work for them and make their lives easier, right? And that's how they moved up the management. And that all broke, right? Because every, you know, your incentives as an intern or as a first year associate or whatever you are, your incentives are 100% deliver the best product you can. Who's better than you? Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini. So you will deliver Claude or ChatGPT or Gemini answers. And this is not like being digitally native because you don't know what you're delivering. You're just handing stuff over.

[20:28](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1228) And every real manager has realized, why would I give feedback to a human who takes a lot of time to do the work? I could just have clawed to it myself. So we've just broken the entire system that forms professional taste and judgment, and we haven't figured out a full replacement yet. What are your thoughts? What are you telling your students? So I think that there are a couple things. One is at the individual level, we now have to start being really disciplined about when we're going through cognitive surrender, when we're giving stuff up to AI.

[20:49](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1249) And that's really hard to do. First of all, entrepreneurship, which is what I teach, right, and what we've been talking about here, like that's about trying to make your life as easy as possible so you can focus on the hard stuff, right? And, you know, but then you learn nothing, right, as a result of that. But it's also true in every other aspect of life. Like we can easily give up skills to the AI, and I think we all feel tempted every day to do this, and we may never get those skills back.

[21:12](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1272) So we have to purposely add friction to our lives in certain key areas so we maintain an advantage, but we're not incentivized to do so. So at the individual level, it's going to be making choices. At the organizational level, companies are going to do one of two things. They're going to either follow the easy path or hard path. And I worry about the easy path, which is only hire senior people. And we're seeing some signs of that.

[21:31](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1291) I know you've had some economists on talk about this. There's some early signals that junior jobs might be threatened. We're not 100% sure yet. Or the other option, the harder option, is that we actually make training a serious part of jobs, right? So you actually have to give people time to be inefficient. learn on the job. And we, rather than learning be sort of an accental thing, we'll have to teach them. Maybe you have to actually add an extra year to universities that we teach you to be a, you know, a Google person or a McKinsey person or, you know, whatever it is. And there's a year of customized training for you to teach you because we know how to teach and assess people in classrooms that we don't know how to do in the real world anymore.

[22:07](https://realalpha.app/v/sHHYVvG_C4Q/?t=1327) This is such a tough problem. And then I'm thinking about a professional who even completed