AI Is Making the “Competent Jerk” Extinct.
Here’s What Replaces Them.
For decades, expertise bought difficult people a pass. As AI closes the knowledge gap, that pass is expiring, and how you treat people is becoming the only edge that’s left.
XDuce Managed IT & Cybersecurity
6 min read
A landmark Harvard Business Review study tracking over 10,000 work relationships found something counterintuitive; when people need help, they don’t go to the most capable person in the building. They go to the person they like.
The researchers sorted colleagues into four types; the lovable star (skilled and likable), the incompetent jerk (neither), the lovable fool (likable but limited), and the competent jerk, highly skilled, hard to stand. For twenty years, the competent jerk survived because their knowledge was scarce enough that teams had no choice but to tolerate them; AI is removing that excuse.
The competent jerk’s whole business model was scarcity
The HBR research found that people preferred working with a “lovable fool” over a “competent jerk,” even though the fool brought less to the table. The jerk’s expertise was real. But the cost of accessing it, the friction, the tension, the way they made everyone around them feel, outweighed the value of what they knew.
Organizations tolerated that trade-off anyway, because the alternative was worse; losing access to knowledge that existed nowhere else. That was the leverage. Scarce expertise bought social immunity.
AI tools can now answer the technical questions, draft the code, summarize the regulation, or explain the process that used to require going through “that one person” who knew everything but made it miserable to ask. When the knowledge becomes accessible to everyone, the immunity the competent jerk relied on disappears with it.
This doesn’t mean expertise stops mattering. It means expertise stops being rare enough to excuse bad behavior. The bar moves from “do they know things?” to “do they know things and can people stand to work with them?” Only the second half of that question is still scarce.
What’s left when the knowledge advantage disappears
Goodwill, not just outputAn employee asks for a raise and the answer is no, but their manager finds another way to keep them engaged; a new project, a schedule change, public recognition. That accommodation only happens for people the team actually wants to keep. Skill gets you in the door; how you’ve treated people determines whether anyone fights to keep you in the room. |
Shared consequences, shared recoveryWhen a client leaves, even for reasons no single person caused, the impact lands on the whole team; tighter revenue, shifted workloads, lower morale. Teams that have built up goodwill with each other absorb that hit and move on. Teams carrying a competent jerk spend the aftermath managing the jerk’s reaction on top of the loss itself. |
Structure was already replacing the jerk, AI just speeds it up
The more standardized and “McDonald’s-ified” a role becomes, heavily scripted, low autonomy, easy to document, the easier it is to replace the person doing it, competent jerk or not. Highly structured, low-innovation environments are often the result of deliberate investment to make a job predictable for clients and interchangeable for the business. Compensation, and job security, tend to follow that logic.
AI accelerates this for knowledge work the way automation once did for manual work. The tasks that made the competent jerk indispensable, the obscure technical knowledge, the one-person process, the tribal know-how nobody wrote down, are exactly the tasks AI is best at absorbing. What’s left is judgment, relationships, and the ability to work well with other humans under pressure. What you consistently contribute to the people around you is what you experience back from them, and that has never been outsourceable.
We help businesses build teams that don’t need a jerk to function
STARS
The goal is competence and likability, not one or the other
The HBR research is clear that the best outcome isn’t choosing between a competent jerk and a lovable fool, it’s building “lovable stars”; people who are both skilled and good to work with. AI doesn’t replace that combination. It removes the excuse for settling for less than it.
If your organization is rolling out AI tools, the conversation shouldn’t stop at productivity. It’s also a moment to ask which roles, and which people, have been getting a pass on conduct because their knowledge was hard to replace. AI is about to make that knowledge a lot easier to replace.
XDuce helps businesses design AI and managed IT strategies that strengthen how teams work together, not just what they produce, so the people you keep are the ones worth keeping for more than one reason.
“Expertise used to be the reason people put up with you. AI is making sure it no longer has to be.”
Building an AI strategy that strengthens your team?
XDuce helps businesses integrate AI and managed IT in ways that support people, not just processes. Let’s talk about what that could look like for your organization.