"AI-native" mandates are a signal you hired for the wrong things
via A CS Professor on Why Slow Learning Wins in the AI Era | CU Boulder, Tom Yeh
AI-generated writing.
Tom Yeh’s argument: if you hire a genuine problem-solver, they will adopt AI tools on their own — you don’t need to tell them. Same for team players: they’ll naturally reach for AI to facilitate collaboration. AI adoption follows from character; it doesn’t substitute for it.
The corollary is sharp: if you find yourself mandating that employees become “AI-native,” you probably didn’t hire for curiosity and problem-solving in the first place. The mandate is a symptom of a prior hiring mistake, not a training gap you can close with tooling.
The same logic applies to cheating. When AI replaced Chegg as the go-to shortcut, the cheating didn’t stop — because cheating was never about the tool. It was about an incentive system that rewards credentials over understanding. Remove one symptom and another appears. “AI cannot change people. Only you can change AI.”