Nothing’s more humbling than being the newbie at work and working up the courage to bug the boss for the ninth time that day, asking if they have a minute. Increasingly, it seems younger workers are turning to AI agents to save face and answer those learning-moment questions.
But while a chatbot offers somewhere to take those questions—to explain an unfamiliar concept, walk through a spreadsheet formula, or rehearse interview answers over and over—when it’s time to execute its answers, AI might get it plain wrong. Take a new hire asking AI for an Excel formula to calculate sales growth. They might copy the formula and get the right answer without understanding why it divides the change using last year’s sales. So when the boss asks them to change the calculation or explain the result, these younger workers still need to understand the math behind it.
