Where Did You Learn To Look?
We are quietly removing the ordinary work where people used to learn how to care, and then asking them to arrive already knowing how.
The Floor Was The Classroom
I dropped out of high school and started working at fifteen, washing dishes in a restaurant in Vancouver, Canada. By twenty-one I had worked every position in the building, and that year I became its new owner with a partner, which meant I kept working all of them, front and back, for years afterwards, often 7 days a week and 15-18 hours a day. Nobody ever sat me down and taught me customer care. I learned it the way most operators of my generation learned it, by standing close enough to thousands of ordinary moments that the extraordinary ones eventually made sense.
I learned one of my hardest lessons there at a table late one night. A group of 4 guests arrived drunk and brought their own alcohol with them, trying to hide the bottle under the table. I told them to leave, and I was not particularly polite about it. I was insecure back then, and insecurity came out of me as arrogance, so I did not ask them, I threw them out. At the door, one of them turned around and punched me, and I went down flat on my ass, and a fat lip as my tip.
I was right about the rule and wrong about the moment, and it took a fist to teach me that how you hold a boundary is as much a part of care as the boundary itself. Same boundary, higher dignity. I learned that on a restaurant floor in Vancouver long before I ever wrote it down.
Nobody trained me for that table. What prepared me, badly, was every ordinary table before it, and what changed me was living with the consequence. That is exposure, and most of it happens inside work that any efficiency consultant today would classify as low value.
The Prediction That Is Almost Right
This week a post crossed my feed predicting that companies replacing junior roles with AI, and then wondering why they cannot find senior talent in five years, will produce the most predictable crisis in hiring history. I smiled, and then I stopped smiling, because I have watched a slower version of that happen for most of my career.
The prediction is too tidy and simplified. The evidence so far does not show junior jobs simply vanishing. What it shows is stranger. PwC's 2026 AI Jobs Barometer found, across millions of North American entry-level job postings, that the roles most exposed to AI are now seven times more likely to require traditionally senior skills such as leadership, creativity or face-to-face interaction.
Read that as an operator. We are asking young people to arrive with the judgment that used to take years of ordinary work to build, while removing the ordinary work.It Was Never Only About AI
AI is the loudest version of this, not the first. Hotels moved check-in to kiosks, clinics routed calls through menus, and booking platforms meant the junior at the desk never spoke to the guest before arrival. Every one of those systems was sold as saving time, and most of them did. The question nobody asked was whose time, and what that time used to teach.
Four weeks ago I wrote that once care becomes a department, the complaint becomes a ticket, the ticket becomes a queue and the queue becomes a metric. What I did not say is who loses most in that chain. It is the nineteen-year-old at the front who never stands in front of an unhappy guest long enough to learn what to do.
Customer care has always been an apprenticeship. You handle a hundred simple questions before anyone trusts you with the difficult one, and somewhere in those hundred you learn what confusion sounds like before it becomes anger, and when a policy protects a guest and when it only protects the building. If the system absorbs the hundred and hands the junior only the one, we have not saved them time. We have handed them the final exam and deleted the course.
The Evidence Argues Back
I want to be fair here, because some of the research points the other way. Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li and Lindsey Raymond studied 5,179 customer support agents who were given an AI assistant. Productivity rose fourteen percent on average and thirty-four percent for the newest and least skilled agents, while the most experienced barely moved. The authors also found early evidence that the tool spread the habits of the best workers to the newest ones and helped them move down the experience curve faster.
So a system can be a teacher. The risk is not the technology, it is what leaders do with the time it returns.
Use it to put the junior in front of the customer more often, with better support behind them, and you may build seniors faster than any generation before. Use it to pull the junior away from the customer, and you have saved a salary while also eroding the future.
The Bill Arrives Later
This is the part no spreadsheet will show you this quarter, which is exactly why it gets decided badly.
Care works on a delay. Years ago, in the fitness business, I gave some sports nutrition products to a woman for a small aerobics event of 20 participants which most people in the industry would not have given her the time of day. Through a chain of referrals, that small favor eventually came back as a three hundred thousand euro contract for a deal, long after anyone could have connected the two in a specific report.
Capability works on the same delay; the system decision appears as a saving now. The missing seniors appear as a hiring problem in five years, and by then nobody remembers the decision that caused it.
Where The Looking Comes From
Last week I wrote about leaving a bottle cap under a bed to see which housekeepers were looking and which were merely working. A reader and dear woman Cornelia commented on my post, and gave me a sentence I keep returning to: "You can define responsibilities, but you cannot prescribe attachment."
I agree with her. But I keep asking whether the people who found the bottle cap were born looking, or whether they learned it somewhere, over years of ordinary rooms, next to someone who already did it. If it is the second, then you still cannot prescribe attachment, but you can very easily remove the place where it grows.
The Audit
Pick one piece of work you have automated, outsourced or routed through a system in the last three years, and ask three questions.
- What did a junior person used to learn by doing it?
- Where do they learn that now?
- Who is teaching it?
If you can answer the first question and not the other two, you have not removed a cost. You have deferred one, and it will come back with interest.
The Question
So I will ask you directly... Where did you learn to look? Not the course or the certificate, the moment. And would that moment still exist in your business today?
"We did not save them time. We handed them the final exam and deleted the course."
Trust is the only currency that compounds without inflation.
Relationship. Not Transaction.
Georgios B.