In at least America, we don’t just work … we become our work (not an endorsement, just reality). Titles aren’t just labels; they’re identities. So when new technologies show up with the promise to automate, accelerate, or “augment,” it often lands like a threat.
We’ve seen this before. The cloud made IT admins fear obsolescence. Smartphones blurred work-life boundaries and rewrote job expectations overnight. Each shift felt like it chipped away at what made people valuable, until it didn’t.
The ones who adapted didn’t disappear. They got promoted.
Now AI is the next shift. It’s not coming for jobs. It’s coming for the parts of jobs that are exhausting, repetitive, and undervalued… tasks that many junior employees quietly resent, even as they define their day.
For a junior accountant (just as an example), that might mean less data entry and more pattern recognition. Less mindless reconciliation, more meaningful financial insight.
The opportunity isn’t to replace your people. It’s to turn them into AI mentors, trainers, stewards, and architects of smarter workflows. And in doing so, make their roles more essential, not less.
What follows is a how-to playbook — for those who haven’t had to give hundreds of talks in front of employees that aren’t sure whether to take endless notes, or throw you out of the room.
Top 5 reactions I get when speaking:
- Job-loss anxiety – “Will the bot replace me?”
- Identity threat – “I spent years learning GAAP; a machine can’t just take that.”
- Change fatigue – “Another tool, another login.”
- Hidden workload – “Training sounds like extra unpaid work.”
- Loss of control – “What if the AI makes mistakes with my name on it?”
When addressing these challenges, we talk about a 10-step plan to help lean into the purpose of change.
| What You Do: |
Why You Do It: |
| 1. Cast the AI as their apprentice, not their rival. Introduce it as “your digital junior” that handles repetitive reconciliations so the human can tackle analysis. |
Reframing & status: Preserves professional identity and elevates the accountant to teacher. |
| 2. Tie AI training to a tangible personal win. Promise (and later prove) that it will cut month-end close by two hours. Track and share that metric. |
Self-interest & competence: People invest when they see direct payoff. |
| 3. Give them naming rights. Let the accountant choose the bot’s nickname or voice style in the UI, etc. |
Autonomy: Even small choices create ownership. |
| 4. Start with “Golden Nuggets.” Ask for three high value judgement calls they make every week (e.g., spotting revenue recognition edge cases). Feed only those first. |
Small wins & cognitive ease: Low effort, high relevance beats dumping manuals. |
| 5. Provide a “judgement journal.” A simple form where each tricky transaction they resolve becomes a labeled training example. Limit to five minutes a day. |
Habit formation: Micro-routines beat marathon data dumps. |
| 6. Gamify accuracy. Show a dashboard where the AI’s correct matches climb after each journal entry. Celebrate milestones publicly. |
Feedback loops & intrinsic reward: Progress visibility sparks momentum. |
| 7. Pair them with a peer reviewer. Another accountant sanity checks both journal entries and AI outputs once a week. |
Relatedness & psychological safety: Shared responsibility reduces fear of solo failure. |
| 8. Broadcast early victories. Email the team when the AI auto-flags its first duplicate invoice and saves $500. Credit the accountant by name and share upside. |
Recognition: Social proof validates the effort and signals career value. |
| 9. Formalize “AI Steward” in their growth path. Add it to their performance goals and link it to promotion criteria or a certification. |
Career narrative: Converts extra work into résumé gold. |
| 10. Keep the loop open. Hold a 15-minute monthly “AI retro” to refine prompts, share bugs, and ask “What do you want the agent to learn next?” |
Continuous improvement & control: Regular voice keeps enthusiasm alive and errors low. |
Paint the AI as the junior accountant’s custom-built protégé, hungry for their hard won judgement. Make success measurable, the workload bite sized, and the recognition public. By turning training into a career accelerator rather than a threat, you satisfy autonomy, competence, and relatedness — often the three levers that motivate humans at work.
Do that, and your junior accountant becomes the proud mentor of an AI that makes everyone’s work a little smoother, while their own career steps into the future first.
Even bigger, the world’s future managers will be managers of hybrid AI teams. It’s never too late to start, but if everyone else has already started…
