Dear Editor,
Mohave County is building more direct bridges between training and employers. Mohave College’s Pipeline Connects career platform is designed to link students and jobseekers with employers, while the college’s Advanced Manufacturing Training Center expands hands-on preparation for technical work.
Those pathways should become the model for office and professional jobs reshaped by AI.
The Stanford Digital Economy Lab’s August update finds employment among U.S. workers ages 22 to 25 in highly AI-exposed occupations about 19% below where it would be if it had kept pace with same-aged workers in less-exposed occupations. The comparable shortfall was 15% in the July 2025 data vintage, with reduced hiring driving most of the adjustment.
Technical training works because learners do not stop at watching a demonstration. They practice, troubleshoot and eventually own the task. AI-era office training needs the same simulator principle.
A new employee can begin by checking an AI-generated draft against source documents. Next, the employee handles a defined exception the model cannot resolve. Then the employee makes a supervised recommendation that affects a customer, schedule, budget, patient, shipment or project. Each stage should end with a clear competence test before the next level of responsibility.
This approach gives employers the efficiency of AI without turning young workers into permanent assistants to the software. It also gives Mohave County a better workforce metric: not how many people completed AI training, but how many became capable of making sound decisions independently.
The region is already investing in pathways that connect training to work. The same discipline should govern AI adoption. Every productivity gain should help create the next expert, not remove the assignments that once trained one.
Gleb Tsipursky, PhD
Behavioral scientist, CEO of Disaster Avoidance Experts, and author of The Psychology of AI Adoption at Work: From Resistance to Results (Georgetown University Press, 2026). https://disasteravoidanceexperts.com/aibook
