Where Will My Kids Get Their Reps?

My kids will never know a world without AI. I built 20+ years of experience the slow way. I'm not sure they'll get that chance, or whether it will matter. Here's what I'm finding.

Close to 300 guests were already finding their seats on the lawn when the weather turned.

Modern Moments was mostly an outdoor venue, so we'd been through weather before. But never with this many people, and never this close to "I do." The ceremony was minutes away. Every chair had to come inside. Now.

One of my teenage kids was on that crew.

Think about what that job actually was. Move hundreds of chairs fast without making it look like panic. At the same time, deal with 300 frustrated, worried guests. Some were annoyed. Some were asking questions nobody had answers to yet. And somewhere in the middle of it all was a couple watching the day they'd pictured for a year change in real time.

The staff's job wasn't just to move the furniture. It was to make sure that the couple still got their happily ever after.

What I remember most is the confidence. My kid looked at a worried guest and said, "Don't worry, ma'am, we've got this." Then, I went and made it happen. No speech. No hesitation. Just action.

When the weather turns on you, actions speak louder than words. That couple got their happily ever after. And that's a lot to ask of a young teenager.

You can't learn that from a prompt.

On September 1st, I sold Modern Moments. It was the right decision at the right time. But I didn't fully appreciate what I was handing over with the keys. For years, that building was a classroom for my kids and many other young people in Gilbert. They learned to serve people on the biggest day of their lives. No do-overs. No undo button.

Since then, a question has been following me around.

The question I can't shake

I've worked in home services marketing for over 20 years. I know things about that industry I couldn't fully explain if you asked me to write them down. Patterns. Gut calls. The tone in a client's voice right before they leave. That knowledge came from reps. Thousands of them. Most were boring. A lot of them were mistakes.

My nine kids will never know a world without AI. And the tasks where I got my reps (the first drafts, the grunt work, the "go figure it out" assignments) are exactly the tasks AI is getting good at.

So will they ever build 20 years of experience in anything? And as AI gets stronger and more reliable, will that experience even matter?

I don't know. But I didn't want to just guess, so I went looking.

What I found: the first rung is cracking

Stanford's Digital Economy Lab has been tracking this using payroll data from ADP. Their finding: workers ages 22 to 25 in the most AI-exposed jobs saw a 16% relative drop in employment, even after accounting for company-level factors. [1]

Here's the part that stopped me. In those same AI-exposed fields, employment for workers 30 and older grew between 6% and 12%. [2]

Read that again. Experience isn't losing value. Right now, it's gaining value.

PwC found something similar from the other direction. After analyzing 2.4 million U.S. entry-level job postings, they found that entry-level roles most exposed to AI are now seven times more likely to require senior-level skills like judgment, leadership, and face-to-face interaction. [3] They call it "seniorization." Those rewritten roles grew 35% since 2019, while other entry-level postings shrank 10%. [4]

So the entry-level job isn't disappearing. It's being rewritten for people with experience.

That's the trap. You need experience to get the job that used to give you experience.

What AI is doing to how kids learn

This is the study that made it personal.

Researchers followed 26,811 middle and high school students in China for 30 months. After students started using AI, homework scores went up 18% and time spent on homework dropped by 30%. Then their closed-book exam scores fell 20% within six months. High-stakes entrance exam scores eventually dropped 18% to 24%. [5]

Better homework. Worse learning.

But here's what gives me hope. About 1 in 5 AI users kept spending roughly the same amount of time on homework as students who didn't use AI. Their learning losses were small. [6] The losses showed up in the other 80%, whose fast completion times and high homework scores pointed to one thing: AI was doing the work for them. [5]

The tool didn't decide the outcome. How they used it did.

I'd love to tell you all my kids are in that 1 in 5. I'm honestly not sure they are.

What I'm actually doing (not much, but something)

I don't have a system for this. I have a few convictions and a lot of trial and error.

1. Send them to the counter first.

I've always pushed my kids toward customer service jobs when they're young. Not because it pays well. Because it teaches you how to deal with people: conflict, frustration, reading someone who's having a bad day, and fixing it anyway.

And they've taken it to heart, even outside of Modern Moments. One of my kids works at Goodwill. Another at Chick-fil-A. One of my daughters is an RA in her college dorm, which might be the most advanced customer service job there is.

There's research behind why this works. Psychologists Daniel Kahneman and Gary Klein concluded that you can only trust gut instinct when two things are true: the environment has real patterns, and the person has had a chance to learn them through practice and feedback. [7] An upset customer is about the fastest feedback there is.

One honest wrinkle: the Stanford research lists customer service reps among the most AI-exposed jobs. [2] But there's a difference between answering tickets in a queue and calming down a worried guest in person. Face-to-face interaction is on PwC's list of skills employers now want from entry-level hires. [3] That's the kind of customer service my kids are getting.

2. Bring AI home because school won't (yet).

Schools are still sheepish about AI. I get it. But my kids are going to use it either way, so I'd rather they learn it at the kitchen table than figure it out alone. I've written about that before, and it's still a work in progress at our house.

3. The part I haven't figured out.

How do I make sure they do the hard thinking before they hand it to AI?

I've said for years, on stages and on my podcast, that you probably won't lose your job to AI. You'll lose it to someone who knows AI better than you. I still believe that.

But I'm realizing it assumes something. Knowing AI "better" means knowing your field well enough to catch it when it's wrong. I had 20 years of reps before AI showed up. My kids won't. So what does "knowing AI better" even mean for someone who never built the foundation underneath it?

I don't have a clean answer. I'm working on it in real time, at my own dinner table.

Where I've landed (for now)

I don't think my kids will have 20 years of experience the way I do. I think theirs will look different. Fewer boring reps. More of them with real people and real stakes. And they'll have to choose those reps on purpose, because the world won't hand them out the way it handed them to me.

That's why I keep pushing them toward the counter. My kids aren't projects to be made more efficient. They're people being formed. And formation takes time, friction, and other people.

I don't have the venue anymore. But I think about that crew hauling chairs through a crowd of 300 worried guests and still handing a couple the day they deserved. I still hear "Don't worry, ma'am, we've got this." I know what that day built in my kid.

My job now is to help all nine of them find the next room like that.

P.S. If you run a business and you're wondering who's training your next generation of hires, that's a conversation I'm having with owners at Digital Ignitor.

Sources

1. Brynjolfsson, E., Chandar, B., & Chen, R. (2025). Canaries in the Coal Mine? Six Facts about the Recent Employment Effects of Artificial Intelligence. Stanford Digital Economy Lab. https://digitaleconomy.stanford.edu/publications/canaries-in-the-coal-mine/

2. Chow, A. R. "A New Stanford Analysis Reveals Who's Losing Jobs to AI." TIME. https://africa.time.com/?p=18230

3. PwC. "2026 AI Jobs Barometer" press release, July 2026. https://www.pwc.com/id/en/media-centre/press-release/2026/english/ai-jobs-barometer-en.html

4. PwC. 2026 Global AI Jobs Barometer. https://www.pwc.com/gx/en/issues/artificial-intelligence/future-of-work.html

5. Strömberg, D., Lei, V., & Wu, Y. (2026). The Generative AI Learning Penalty: Evidence from Chinese Secondary Education. CEPR Discussion Paper DP21577. https://cepr.org/publications/DP21577

6. Strömberg, D., Lei, V., & Wu, Y. (2026). "The generative AI learning penalty in secondary school." VoxEU column, CEPR. https://cepr.org/voxeu/columns/generative-ai-learning-penalty-secondary-school

7. Kahneman, D., & Klein, G. (2009). "Conditions for Intuitive Expertise: A Failure to Disagree." American Psychologist, 64(6), 515–526. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0016755