The corporate career ladder is breaking and AI is the reason

For decades, we've been sold a very specific story about how careers are meant to work. You start at the bottom, you put in your time, you climb carefully, and eventually your experience earns you a seat at the table. Seniority is meant to equal insight and tenure is meant to equal value.

What I've noticed is that AI is quietly dismantling that story.

Here's another prediction for 2026.

What's becoming uncomfortable, particularly in large corporates and consulting firms, is that experience is no longer the advantage people assume it is. In many organisations today, the most senior leaders know far less about how AI actually functions in practice than someone fresh out of school who has spent the last two years learning tools like ChatGPT. Not academically. Not theoretically. Practically.

This isn't a criticism of senior leaders. It's a reflection of how quickly the rules have changed. AI rewards exposure, experimentation, and speed far more than it rewards hierarchy. The person who has been testing workflows, automating tasks, and pushing tools to their limits often has more usable capability than someone who has spent decades mastering a pre-AI way of working.

Consulting is a sharp example of this shift. We still treat seniority as a proxy for wisdom, but when the underlying tools of thinking, analysis, and delivery evolve this fast, tenure stops being a reliable signal. In some cases, you could get more practical AI advice from a 22 year old than from someone who has spent 40 years at a firm like McKinsey. That idea makes people uncomfortable, but discomfort doesn't make it untrue.

AI doesn't care about job titles or reporting lines. It cares about leverage. It amplifies people who can see inefficiency and do something about it. The people who thrive are the ones who are curious enough to experiment, practical enough to automate, and grounded enough to understand how people actually work inside organisations. That combination is becoming far more valuable than a perfectly climbed career ladder.

I'm already seeing this play out in real life. A friend's son, in his early 20's, recently started a new corporate role. He automated a significant portion of his job using AI. He didn't wait for permission. He simply solved the problem in front of him. Management noticed. Then their managers noticed. The work travelled upward because the value was obvious. This is not a one-off story. It's a preview of what will happen everywhere.

This shift also helps explain why startups are becoming such an attractive career move for many people. Not because startups are easier or safer, but because they are structurally aligned with how AI changes work. In the right startup environment, ideas matter more than tenure. Outcomes matter more than optics. Automation is rewarded, not quietly resisted. A good idea from a 20 year old doesn't get dismissed simply because someone else has been there longer.

Start-ups are anti-waste. And AI is exposing just how much organisational effort has been propping up inefficiency for years.

This doesn't mean we should abandon corporate careers overnight. But it does mean that relying solely on tenure, titles, and institutional knowledge is becoming a risky strategy. The people who will do best over the next few years will be those who invest early in AI literacy, understand automation at a systems level, and are willing to redesign how their own work gets done. They won't wait to be invited into the room. They'll create value that makes the room come to them.

At Paadia, that is exactly where we focus. We don't treat AI as a shiny add-on or a productivity hack. We help people build real AI literacy so they can rethink how work happens, especially inside complex, hierarchical environments. Because the career ladder isn't just shifting. In any places, it's collapsing.

And the people who adapt first won't be the most senior, they'll be the most fluent.