Today's Work, Tomorrow's Workforce: Incentivizing Learning in AI-Assisted Work

Abstract

At work, people develop skills through experience: novices acquire skills by completing tasks, while experts retain theirs through continued practice. AI assistance changes this process by offering workers a choice between solving tasks independently and accepting the AI's answers. While relying on AI saves immediate effort, it can also displace the practice needed to acquire and retain skills, including those required to oversee the AI. We extend an existing accept-or-solve model to a sequence of tasks in which workers' skills evolve through independent practice and reliance on AI. We compare myopic workers, who maximize immediate utility, with strategic workers, who also value their future skills. We show that novices can become trapped at low skill levels, while experts may lose skill, even as AI-assisted outcome accuracy remains high. Strategic workers, by contrast, may choose to solve independently even when AI is more accurate, recognizing the future value of acquiring and retaining their skills. We then study incentives that reward correct independent work and characterize the payments needed to encourage skill acquisition and retention. We show that independent work can become self-sustaining once workers acquire sufficient skill, eliminating the need for continued incentives. Counterintuitively, supporting a higher skill target can sometimes reduce long-run incentive costs, either by enabling self-sustaining independent work or by lowering the payments needed to maintain proficiency. Our findings thereby shift the focus from whether workers should rely on AI on individual tasks to how organizations can sustain human expertise over time, and which skills are worth investing in.