Performance Gap

This WSJ article matches what I have observed in the field for the last few years and what the author says:

The conventional wisdom is that artificial intelligence will level the playing field among employees... My research suggests this conventional wisdom is wrong. I believe it is the superstars themselves who will gain the most from AI, widening the chasm between top performers and everyone else.

That is exactly how I've seen it work. Many average employees tend to believe that AI is a fad and will pass. Everyone will have a moment of reckoning when they see how idiotic the whole thing is and then people will have to go back to doing things the old and hard way. They most certainly don't want to atrophy those muscles so they stick with the tried and true, waiting for the insanity to end. They are however pushed to work two or three times harder just to keep up because of the new bar created by the superstars. 

This is where the resentment comes in. The other strategy I've seen taken my the average folk is to call things impossibly hard to solve. Case in point, data sits in ten silos and it just will take five years to get the house in order. It is what God intended and no AI can change that game. They build a moat around their supposedly unsolvable problem and don't allow anyone come near it, definitely not the superstars with the ideas.

 The problem is the executive leadership in smaller companies tend to notice some of these superstars and decide to turn them lose on some of these mythical, impossible problems see what they can do. To the great advantage of the superstar there is no expectation that anything can be done at all because that has been the story for the longest time so there is no penalty at all for failure but if they do succeed as they often do, it upends the lives of many. I am not sure there is a good solution to the problem. It just so happens that it is no longer an option to be average but logically the overwhelming majority of employees are average. This means the size if the workforce has to shrink dramatically and/or there has to be a path for those in the average bucket to attain and demonstrate mastery somewhere. Not sure if any of that is feasible quite yet.