A provocative piece arguing that in the AI era, experience can become a burden rather than an asset is drawing attention.

The author is Foundation Capital partner Jaya Gupta (자야 굽타). She recently highlighted on social media platform X (Twitter) that experience is no longer a moat and in many cases is starting to look like a tax.

She stresses a gap between senior and junior generations on AI and says the experience held by seniors could be negative for AI innovation.

To illustrate this, she compares a hypothetical large-company CIO with a young employee. She said, "The large-company CIO has never even opened Claude and asks subordinates to print documents and put them on his desk. He makes the company’s AI investment decisions. Across Fortune 500 companies, the people deciding AI adoption are the ones who have used AI the least. By contrast, a young employee builds production code in half a day and turns a napkin sketch into a working prototype before lunch. The two groups are experiencing the same technology in completely different ways."

According to Gupta, the senior generation justifies its position with two words: judgment and intuition. The junior generation feels it learns more by spending half an afternoon with AI than it used to learn from a mentor in a month. But in meetings it gets held back by lines like, "In my experience," and, "We don’t do it that way."

Gupta asks whether judgment and intuition are truly sustainable capabilities, or the last line of defense for a generation that has lost other advantages. She conveys that she leans toward the latter.

She says the real reason organizations have not explored doing something new, as opposed to doing things as they are, is not only cost. It is because the people with decision-making authority had more to lose if it failed.

She said, "Seniors have credibility built up over a lifetime, so they stand to lose a lot when they fail. Juniors do not yet have credibility to lose."

Gupta also drew attention to the end of an era in which people gained an edge based on career experience alone. She said, "For a long time, expert capability was the ability to find the right example from past experience. AI narrows that gap. A second-year lawyer can, in minutes, organize similar precedents by relevance and even get a summary. The era when a person with 20 years of experience beats someone with 20 months solely on resume is coming to an end."

She also said a changing environment around decision-making could be another area that does not align with the senior generation.

Gupta said, "This is an era when you can change a product in the afternoon and roll it back the next morning. You decide fast, learn fast, flip it if it is wrong, and decide again. Seniors have learned throughout their careers that flipping a decision is admitting the last decision was wrong. Young people’s identities are not yet tied to decisions. Reversing a decision feels less like failure than a process of improvement."

Ultimately, Gupta believes that in the AI era, experience is becoming a tax. She said, "When seniors say something can’t be done, sometimes they are seeing something young people can’t see, but sometimes they may be following past decisions. Sometimes they may not be able to be wrong because if they are wrong, reputation, internal politics and what has already been reported to the board collapse all at once."

She said there are times when even the decision-maker cannot tell whether they are expressing real insight or trying to protect themselves. She said, "Experience is no longer a moat. In many cases, it is starting to look like a tax," adding, "Think when you can think without watching the room. That ability disappears faster than you think."