Nobody notices when a company forgets

Jeff Reynar, chief executive of the AI start-up this+that, argues that when AI agents do the work, people's skills and a company's knowledge can fade without anyone noticing.

Jeff Reynar is chief executive of this+that, a start-up that sells AI software to handle the work arriving in a company's email and chat. In a randomised trial he cites, 133 patent lawyers used an AI drafting assistant for three months, and only the senior lawyers came away more skilled. He argues that a company forgets in a similar way when AI agents handle its work and nobody writes down the reasoning behind their decisions.

• With the assistant, the quality of the lawyers' work rose, and the juniors gained the most. The study's authors conclude: "The largest gains from AI thus accrued to the lawyers who retained the least."
• For a company, Reynar argues, the loss is worse, because no one feels it: every case an agent handles correctly looks fine. In his words: "There is no dashboard for what your company used to know and doesn’t anymore."
• His first remedy borrows from airlines, which keep pilots practising rare failures in simulators. He proposes three steps: list the work agents now do, check whether people are losing the skill behind it, and, where they are, schedule practice without AI.
• His second remedy is a written record of each conclusion an agent reaches, kept where the next person and the next agent will read it.

A product or design team that hands work to AI agents can decide which of the skills behind that work people must keep practising without AI. This is an inference, and Reynar's second remedy, a written record of what agents conclude, is a feature of the software his company sells.

Derived by Working Surface from the article. Source line: Identify what you’ve automated. Evaluate whether the skill behind it is eroding. Drill where it is.

29 September 2026: when AI tools do the making, a team has to keep some of the old steps on purpose.