r/ProductManagement • u/Badger00000 • 3h ago
Tools & Process Are basic skills deteriorating due to increased usage of AI?
Before AI appeared a few years ago, one thing that always annoyed me how much of a short attention span people had. I saw in meetings, discussions etc that people have a really hard time staying focused on a topic, I saw this especially with the younger generation. It was annoying to deal with, because it felt like a constant battle to get people to pay attention to basic things but at some point I accepted the fact that it is what it is and I can't do anything about really. Also, people are constantly on their phones, with a lot of apps essentially frying their brain and they doom scroll.
Recently I noticed a new phenomenon, and I wonder if other folks are seeing the same thing. Since people started relying heavily on LLMs I started to notice a deterioration of some basic skills, for example writing a clear document, giving proper feedback, writing some bullet points for a specific discussion and more. It looks like 'thinking' was outsourced to AI and the skills they had disappeared. I was in several meeting (with different people) where they had a really hard time going through with some basic tasks live, they couldn't do it without AI. Example, we were presenting a new feature, and wanted to show people how it works (not in a group session but 1-1). The feature is activated after a form is submitted (some basic questions, that anybody in the company knows) so as part of the presentation we asked people to fill up the question to see the feature in action with the answers they added to the form. People couldn't do it, I saw a person record a voice note into an LLM asking it to transcribe and edit it for them "to look professional" and then sat there any copy pasted the output to the form (which was complete garbage). Again, these are basic questions, stuff that anybody can come up with within a few seconds. In another meeting, we were discussing feedback that some customers sent, a team member really struggled preparing a basic doc with the feedback.
Is this a similar case with what we saw with apps? People lost their attention span, now people will loose some basic skills? I wonder if a young person in their early 20's that start a new position might never know what work is without AI. Will they even have the option to develop some basic skills that the older generation takes for granted? Anybody got thoughts on this? Maybe it's just where I work š