If I had to make a single bet on what will be one of the largest shifts in an AI enabled world this is it: Companies that build and train employees to be Default-AI will outperform those who don’t.

What is a Default-AI Employee?

I define Default-AI like this: For all general and specific work tasks, the employee integrates generative AI capabilities and platforms as the default tools for their job.

Not internal training documents, existing company tools, or standard operating procedures.

Let’s take a Research Analyst as an example. Her primary job should be to figure out how to leverage AI tools to assist her research quality and output as a first priority. She would use blend of company owned internal tools and general purpose platforms like ChatGPT to improve her quality and speed of analysis.

Or consider a Customer Support rep that is responding to customer issues. A Default-AI employee would quickly identify that they could leverage an LLM trained on internal sales calls to rapidly troubleshoot common customer issues. (We built a version of this for ourselves at Rescue Payments)

How this is different

The crucial differentiation here is that the Default-AI company places the responsibility to determine how to leverage AI tools on each individual contributor, not as a top-down directive of management.

In the pre-AI world, companies required employees to use the tools selected by company and be trained on internal procedures for the role.

The inverse is true today.

Employees should be empowered to deconstruct their work objectives and sort them into tasks that require human action and those that can be enhanced with AI. This is not a one time act – as the tools evolve and get better, the individual is responsible for adapting the workflow to take advantage of it. The only way that can happen is if that responsibility extends to the person closest to the task. This is not typically a manager.

Said another way, Generative AI fundamentally rewrites workflows because it shifts the responsibility to better, faster, smarter, or less expensive from the organization to the individual.

How to build a company around this concept

Let’s break this down further.

In order to accelerate this shift, it requires an organizational capability to be able to create and rapidly connect AI tools and apps internally. Forming a small internal development team to support and stitch together employee-driven ideas. The Default-AI employee can leverage this team to rapidly deploy tools and test them in their day-to-day.

Here is why it matters.

If you are making a hiring decision today, willingness and capability to be Default-AI contributor should be part of the criteria.

At Rescue, we ask questions like "When was the last time you used an AI tool for your job?" and "What parts of your previous role could have been substantially improved if you had full control over how you did your job and what tools you used?"

Today, the Default-AI mindset is specifically associated with knowledge work, but will soon expand to other categories. One could imagine a plumber taking a Default-AI approach to their daily tasks and quickly building a proprietary stack that improves their quality and speed.

Evaluating this is nuanced and specific to the role.

But the returns on hiring talent through this lens will be outsized.