This post was originally featured in the June 11th, 2025 newsletter found here: INBOX INSIGHTS, June 11, 2025: When AI-First Goes Wrong Part 3, Speakability and Text to Speech AI
When AI-First Goes Spectacularly Wrong – Part 3
If you missed Part 2 on why smart companies keep making the same AI mistakes, you can find it here. This week: the hidden costs of the “replacement approach” to AI.
Most leaders focus on what they’ll save by eliminating human roles, but they never calculate what they’ll lose.
So let’s do that calculation. Here’s your SWOT analysis of what actually happens when organizations choose replacement over partnership.
Strengths Lost: The Internal Expertise Drain
Institutional Knowledge Disappears:
Those contractors Duolingo eliminated didn’t just create content—they knew what worked. They understood which lessons confused beginners, which cultural references landed, and which teaching approaches actually helped retention.
This isn’t information you can feed into an AI model. It’s pattern recognition developed over thousands of interactions with real learners. When you eliminate the people, you lose the insights that took years to develop.
Tacit Knowledge Evaporates:
The most valuable knowledge in any organization is tacit—the stuff people know but can’t easily explain. How to spot quality issues before they become problems. Which customers need extra attention. When to break the rules to get better outcomes.
AI can replicate explicit processes, but tacit knowledge lives in people’s heads and transfers through relationships. Eliminate the people, and it’s gone forever.
Innovation Capacity Shrinks:
Here’s the organizational behavior insight that leaders miss: the people doing day-to-day work are often your best source of improvement ideas. They see problems first and understand why current processes fail.
When you eliminate those roles, you don’t just lose current capabilities—you lose your ability to spot opportunities for future improvements.
Weaknesses Created: New Organizational Vulnerabilities
Quality Control Gaps:
Duolingo’s remaining human reviewers are now overwhelmed trying to catch errors across dozens of language programs. The workload that was distributed among many experts is now concentrated among fewer people.
This creates bottlenecks, burnout, and gaps. Quality doesn’t just maintain—it degrades as remaining staff struggle to cover expanded responsibilities.
Knowledge Transfer Breakdown:
When experienced people leave (voluntarily or involuntarily), their knowledge leaves with them. But the organizational behavior pattern is worse: remaining employees stop sharing knowledge freely when they think their job security depends on being irreplaceable.
This creates knowledge hoarding, reduces collaboration, and makes the organization more fragile.
Learning Organization Dysfunction:
Organizations learn through people. When you eliminate the people who understand both current operations and potential improvements, you break the learning loop that drives continuous improvement.
Opportunities Missed: The External Competitive Costs
Market Responsiveness Declines:
Human experts can adapt quickly to cultural shifts, trending topics, or emerging learner needs. They can create timely, relevant content that connects with current events or social movements.
AI can scale existing patterns but struggles with real-time cultural responsiveness. You miss opportunities to stay relevant and connected to your audience.
Innovation Potential Shrinks:
The most successful product innovations come from deep domain expertise combined with user empathy. People who understand both the subject matter and the audience can spot opportunities that data alone can’t reveal.
Eliminate the domain experts, and you lose your capacity for breakthrough innovation.
Competitive Differentiation Erodes:
What made Duolingo special wasn’t just language lessons—it was culturally aware, creating sound content created by experts who understood learning science.
As they move toward AI-generated content, they lose the differentiation that human expertise provided. They become more like their competitors, not better than them.
Threats Increased: New Competitive Vulnerabilities
Competitor Advantage Creation:
While Duolingo eliminates language experts, competitors who maintain human expertise can offer superior cultural authenticity and sophistication.
The talent Duolingo eliminated doesn’t disappear—it goes to competitors, taking institutional knowledge with it.
Brand Vulnerability Amplification:
The social media backlash revealed something crucial: customers value human expertise. When users comment “mama may I have real people running the company,” they’re expressing preference for human-created content.
Brands that eliminate visible human expertise become vulnerable to competitors who emphasize their human element.
Crisis Response Capacity Diminished:
The masked employee video and social media blackout revealed another hidden cost: when crisis hits, you need people who deeply understand your brand, audience, and values.
AI can’t navigate nuanced reputation management or cultural sensitivity during a crisis. The people who could have managed this crisis effectively were the ones being eliminated.
Market Disruption Susceptibility:
Organizations with strong human expertise can pivot quickly when markets shift. They can identify new opportunities, adapt offerings, and respond to disruption.
Organizations that have eliminated human judgment and creativity become more rigid and less adaptable to change.
The Organizational Behavior Pattern
Here’s what’s really happening: leaders see AI capabilities and assume human capabilities become redundant. But they’re not calculating the systemic effects on organizational learning, adaptation, and resilience.
The SWOT reveals a dangerous pattern: short-term cost savings create long-term competitive vulnerabilities that are much more expensive to address than the original human expertise would have been.
The Strategic Question
The question isn’t whether AI can handle specific tasks that humans currently do. It’s whether eliminating human expertise makes your organization stronger or weaker in the long term.
For most organizations, the SWOT analysis reveals that replacement approaches trade short-term savings for long-term competitive disadvantage.
The companies that thrive with AI won’t be the ones that eliminate human expertise most aggressively. They’ll be the ones that figure out how to amplify human capabilities while maintaining the organizational strengths that expertise provides.
Next week in Part 4: How to implement AI in ways that preserve organizational strengths while building new capabilities.
What expertise is your organization at risk of losing?
Reply to this email to tell me, or come join the conversation in our free Slack Group, Analytics for Marketers.
– Katie Robbert, CEO
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