“AI Delegation” — The Skill Our Kids Will Need Most?

There is a vigorous debate underway about the role Generative AI should play in education. Should we keep the technology out? Actively hunt down things written by ChatGPT? Develop GAI-based tutoring systems?

Like many things, we need to look further down the road to understand how we must adapt our plans. Generative AI’s ability to analyze, summarize and create continues to amaze us all. But this is just the start. If you spend any time building your own AI bot or AI character, you quickly realize the next step is an AI with purpose and the ability to act on that purpose.

This is called “Agentic AI” — bots that can go do complex things for you (or themselves). If you think Generative AI is powerful, wait until the agents arrive on the scene.

Building quality AI agents is a hugely difficult technical challenge and current Generative AI approaches are probably not up to the task. But the technology is moving quickly and the potential corporate productivity rewards ensure ample R&D funding. Anthony Alcarez recently published an excellent overview of the technical challenges associated with Agentic AI.

In his article, Anthony suggests that in the future, job-seekers may work with a variety of AI agents to find a job. One may interview the job-seeker to find out what kind of job is best. Another will write resumes and customize them for specific jobs. Another will conduct the search, apply for jobs, and draft cover letters. A final one may help with interview prep and salary negotiation. The bots will build and maintain specialization for dealing with HR departments that themselves are using AI to select candidates.

In essence, our next-gen job seeker must be able to delegate complex tasks to a team of employment specialists. Job-seeking chores will be better left to specialist bots, allowing the job-seeker to focus on new skills and the interview prep that will make him or her stand out. Our next-gen job-seeker will have a search team to manage … and those who don’t know how to manage that team will be at a distinct disadvantage.

The AI future is going to require our kids and grandkids to be masters of delegation. They will be delegating complex personal and professional tasks to all sorts of AI agents. (Current early and mid-career people should also take note: AI delegation will be a new corporate survival skill.)

Unfortunately, delegation stands in stark contrast to traditional education which focuses on teaching kids “how” to do things. We teach them how to write a paper and do algebra. We force them to memorize facts and produce a bibliography. We teach them to do art and music. Learning “how” to do things is, of course, critical as it is the foundation of understanding higher level concepts. But it is not enough for the future.

An AI-powered economy will rely less on knowing “how” to do things and more on being an excellent delegator and manager of highly capable AI agents. AI delegation will become the new basis for “how” many things get done.

Nowhere in our children’s education do we teach them how to delegate. In fact, we are inclined to punish it. We’re going to have to change this paradigm and embrace teaching kids to delegate to AI.

Telling ChatGPT to write, ideate, or review something is a form of delegation. The same for asking Midjourney to produce an image or GitHub Copilot to recommend some computer code. Let’s embrace these early tools and use them to build delegation competence.

By high school — and probably by middle school — complex assignments should include an AI delegation plan. Children should think through where and how they want to use AI to accomplish an assignment. They should document that plan, execute it, report on how their AI squad performed, where the squad went off course, and why. We should WANT our kids to get better at AI delegation.

When our kids get “caught” using Generative AI on school assignments, perhaps we should teach them to say “I delegated that to ChatGPT.” The teacher may not like it, but it may be the most valuable thing they are learning to prepare them for the future.