The simple work was never just 'simple' work

The problem was never whether AI can do the work. It's that the work it does best is the same work that used to turn beginners into experts.

For a while now the story has been that digitisation would hollow out service. The bots would take the contacts, the systems would swallow the back office, self-serve would empty the stores, and the teams would thin out. 

Here is something that might surprise you, coming from a CX consultancy: we are big believers in that first part. We help clients digitise every week. Contact centres, processing and operations teams, branches, stores, the lot. Done well, it takes the drudgery out of work, speeds things up for customers, and frees good people from the tasks a machine can genuinely do just as well. We are all for it.

But there is a second part that far fewer people plan for. And it is the part we make sure our clients get right.

What the simple work was really doing 

The routine work was never only a cost to be stripped out. It was doing two things for you that never showed up on a dashboard. The first one was teaching people.

I have spent more than twenty years in and around service and operations, and I have never met anyone who started on the hard stuff. Nobody's first week is the furious customer, the tangled claim, the complex order gone wrong, or the judgment call that carries real risk.

People start on the simple things. They handle the everyday transactions, they make small mistakes in safe moments, they watch how the good ones do it, and bit by bit they build the instinct for the hard ones. It is an apprenticeship, whether it happens on a shop floor, in a processing team, or on the phones, even if we have never bothered to call it that.

Now picture digitising all of the simple work at once, and stopping there. On paper it is a clean win. Cost to serve drops, queues shorten, teams get leaner. But if that is all you do, you have taken away the ground your people used to learn on.

Do that for a few years and something sneaks up on you. You find you are short of experienced people. Not because they left, but because there was nowhere for the next lot to come up through. The bottom rung of the ladder is gone, and then you are left wondering why no one is climbing.

This is not just a gut feel. Sol Rashidi, in a recent Harvard paper on the future of work, gives it a name: the talent formation fracture. The point is a plain one. Today’s experts started as beginners. The technology is very good at exactly the entry-level work, and that entry-level work is how organisations have always grown their future specialists and leaders. Take it out without a plan and you are not just trimming a cost line, you are breaking the way capability gets built. 

The early-career data is the "canary in the coal mine." Workers aged 22–25 saw employment fall roughly 6% between late 2022 and September 2025, while older workers in the same occupations grew 6–9%. Recent-graduate unemployment hit 5.6%, an all-time high, and graduate-level job postings fell 15–20% even as applications per posting climbed. 

The second one showed up in the team rather than the training plan. The easy contacts were a breather. Nobody can spend a whole day on the furious customer, the heartbreaking call, and the mess that has to be untangled by hand, one after another with nothing in between. People need the lighter ones to catch their breath, reset, and go again. Take every easy contact out of the mix and you hand your people a queue of nothing but hard, heavy work, back-to-back, all day. That is the quickest way I know to wear out your best ones and watch them leave, which is a strange result for a change that was meant to make life easier.

Digitise boldly. Build people deliberately. 

So, to be clear, this is not a case for slowing down. We will happily help you automate everything that should be automated. The routine work should go to the machine. That is rather the point of it.

The trick is to plan for the people at the same time, on purpose, and not as an afterthought once the technology is already in.

Rashidi describes the people who do well in this new world as M-shaped. They know their patch, they can work alongside the tools, and they can still make the call a machine cannot. People like that are grown on purpose, not stumbled into.

In practice that means designing roles, so they still grow people, rather than only closing tickets and clearing queues faster. It means putting your teams where humans add the most, the judgment, the trust, the Moments that Matter, and treating those as places people stretch and get better, not the scraps left over once the machines have taken their pick. It means keeping enough variety in the day that a shift is not wall to wall hard going, so people can pace themselves and last. And it means using the technology to train your people, not only to serve your customers, so newcomers reach the hard skills faster now that the simple work is not there to teach them the slow way. 

None of this happens by accident. It happens when you get clear on the problem, and sort out the process and the people alongside the technology, rather than falling in love with a tool first. We say it to clients all the time: fall in love with the problem before you fall in love with the solution.

Digitisation might be one of the best things to happen to service in years. It takes the grind off people and hands back time, money and headspace. But a service operation has never really been a machine for processing contacts and transactions. It is people, learning, getting better, and looking after customers when it counts.

So digitise boldly. We will help you do it. Just build your people up as deliberately as you build your systems. That is the work our High Performance Culture practice exists to do, and it is what turns a clever piece of technology into a business that keeps getting better.