AI fails to compete with mediocre employees

So much hype. Everyone wants to adopted the latest AI tech. MBA's everywhere see dollar signs with automated processes and chatbots. I think a lot of organizations are failing to realize that AI is a tool, not a substitute. I mean, we always had hammers! Houses were built with just hammers and carpenters (or even homeowners, shout out to the sears kit houses). Then we made nail guns, and that increased the efficiency and lowered the cost by reducing time, not by reducing the number of people nailing!

Now you might be thinking, Atom - reduce the number of nailers and your cost goes down, and you can maintain the same efficiency. Fair insight! Doesn't work that way in the real world.

Without dragging out this analogy too much further, the nailers don't just hammer nails into the roof. They have knowledge that extends beyond the instruction manual; removing nails bent certain ways, certain joists that should be redone, yada yada. By removing the human element you reduce creative process and create a black box.

The black box plagues many, but AI is on another level. When you have less and less people with an understanding and comprehension, you create an environment of chaos. Anyone who has vibe coded a web app knows that maintaining it is a measure of copy pasting and begging ChatGpt to fix the errors. Thats not just me saying it, here's Andrej Karpathy (founding member of openAI, late 2025):

"Currently, every time an AI performs an action, there's roughly a 20% chance of error (this is how LLMs work, we can't expect 100% accuracy)," he wrote in a post on LinkedIn. "If an agent needs to complete 5 actions to finish a task, there's only a 32% chance it gets every step right."

Example:
Help desk Ticket Resolution

A ticket comes in from Alice; "I am unable to login to Azure DevOps, but I was able to last week".

Put that into your AI of choice and see what comes out. The suggested resolution will likely be a host of steps that someone still has to go through (and it probably wont be Alice!), and may or may not be right. You're either paying for that in cloud hours or payroll. But a human will recognize a ton of variables that the AI just doesnt have.

There was a change over the weekend that requires you to PIM.
Alice doesn't use Azure Devops much and shes on a team that does use another tool.
Her access was revoked when she moved to a new role.

Whatever it might be its likely going to be resolved via some intuition a more experienced member of the team has. The AI isn't going to replace even the most mediocre employee because it lacks intuition that can change based on very limited context.

Now, compared to a brand new employee with no prior experience - yeah I could see how having an AI is useful. But spending time training a willing newbie will end up being more worthwhile down the road. They can develop that sense for things that can be solved simply. Hopefully (and by god if you are new, please take notes when someone teaches you something) you only need to tell them once or twice.