By Jared Coseglia
A little more than a year ago, we made a decision at TruLegal that felt somewhere between bold and terrifying. We stopped treating AI as something happening to the legal staffing industry and rebuilt our company around the assumption that it was going to fundamentally change it.
We went from 33 to 15 employees. Revenue increased approximately 20%. Every member of our team today is AI-enabled.
Those three sentences are probably enough to start a dozen debates about AI and the future of work. But none of them capture what I believe has been the most profound change.
The biggest change has been psychological.
AI has changed what I consider resourceful. And as a result, it has dramatically changed my tolerance for unresourcefulness.
That admission makes me slightly uncomfortable. Because I don't mean that people suddenly need to know everything. Quite the opposite. I have never cared less about whether someone already knows the answer. What increasingly frustrates me is encountering someone who doesn't know the answer and has made no meaningful AI-assisted attempt to figure it out. I suspect that distinction is about to become one of the defining workplace dynamics of the AI era.
For most of my career, "I don't know how to do that" was a perfectly reasonable workplace response. Knowledge had friction. Expertise was scarce. Research took time. Even a simple question could require finding the right person, searching through documents, or paying an expert.
That friction has collapsed, though it hasn't disappeared entirely.
If you don't understand a concept, AI can explain it to you, and if that explanation doesn't land, it can try again. If you're staring at a spreadsheet you can't parse, it can help you interrogate it. If you don't know how to begin a project, it can give you ten starting points. If you receive an email full of terminology you've never seen, you can start investigating yourself rather than forwarding it to three colleagues.
And start is the important word.
AI doesn't eliminate expertise or judgment, and it certainly doesn't eliminate the possibility of being spectacularly wrong. What it eliminates is a lot of the excuses for not beginning.
Research is already demonstrating how consequential that is. In a study of 5,179 customer-support agents, Brynjolfsson, Li and Raymond found that access to a generative AI assistant increased productivity by about 14% on average, with the greatest gains among novice and lower-skilled workers, where improvement reached roughly 34%. The technology appeared to transfer the practices of more capable workers to people who hadn't yet accumulated that experience. For most of human history, experience was something you acquired almost exclusively through time. AI is beginning to compress portions of that curve. Not eliminate it. Compress it.
Psychologists have studied something adjacent to this for decades. "Learned helplessness" describes what can happen when people come to believe their actions won't materially change an outcome. Separate organizational research has consistently found value in what psychologists call personal initiative: self-starting, proactive behavior that persists through obstacles. Long before ChatGPT existed, that proactive disposition was linked to career success, taking-charge behavior, and job performance.
Resourcefulness isn't new. What is new is the machinery now available to resourceful people, and I think that is changing our expectations of everyone else.
I see it inside our company. I see it with candidates, vendors, and clients. When someone asks my team to spend days on manual data entry, or to solve a problem in the most linear analog way because that's the way they've always wanted it solved, my internal response has changed. A few years ago, my internal thought was that they didn't know. Today I'm more likely to wonder why they haven't tried to find out.
That sounds harsh in writing. But I think a growing number of AI-enabled workers are quietly having the same reaction.
Organizations have always contained invisible transfers of cognitive labor. Someone doesn't investigate something, so someone else does. Someone doesn't read the material, so another employee summarizes it. Someone comes to their manager with a question they could have researched and transfers the intellectual work upward.
Every organization does this. Ours certainly did.
But once you become highly AI-enabled, those transfers become much more visible. You begin recognizing tasks that once took 45 minutes but now take eight. You see the email that could have been summarized before it was forwarded. You see the meeting that exists because nobody spent ten minutes interrogating the problem first.
And suddenly inefficiency doesn't just feel inefficient. It feels inconsiderate. Because time is still finite even when intelligence becomes abundant.
Our work gives us an unusual vantage point, because we interact daily with professionals and organizations at wildly different stages of AI adoption. An AI-enabled conversation often starts further down the field. People arrive having already investigated, synthesized, and tested assumptions. They may still need us, but for judgment, market knowledge, pattern recognition, and nuance that actually benefits from decades of experience. The frustrating interactions increasingly involve basic intellectual legwork that AI has made extraordinarily accessible.
That shift is going to change professional services broadly. Clients will resent paying experts to perform tasks they believe AI should have accelerated. Employees will grow less tolerant of colleagues who continually outsource basic problem-solving. The professional currency becomes less about "I know the answer" and more about "I know how to get us closer to the answer."
Before anyone forwards this to their staff with the subject line "PLEASE READ," there's another side to the argument.
AI-enabled resourcefulness cannot mean blind delegation to machines. Research from Microsoft Research and Carnegie Mellon University found that greater confidence in generative AI is associated with less critical thinking effort, not because AI removes thinking entirely, but because it shifts where thinking occurs, toward verification, integration, and task stewardship.
The employee who types something into ChatGPT and unquestioningly forwards the response is not resourceful. They've automated their unresourcefulness.
AI fluency isn't the ability to prompt. It's the ability to frame, interrogate, challenge, verify, synthesize, and decide.
Research on consultants described a "jagged technological frontier." Tasks that look similar can fall on opposite sides of what AI can reliably do. The lesson isn't to use AI for everything. The lesson is to know where the frontier is, and keep moving with it.
Curiosity. Initiative. Judgment. The willingness to push past the first obstacle. The humility to ask a machine to explain something you don't understand. The skepticism to verify what it tells you. The creativity to ask a better question. The courage to make a decision when neither human nor machine can provide certainty.
Those qualities have always mattered. AI just magnifies the difference between people who possess them and people who don't.
After transforming TruLegal into an AI-enabled company, I don't expect my people to have every answer. We're moving too quickly for that.
What I increasingly expect is movement.
Show me what you tried. Show me what you found. Show me the prompts. Show me the sources. Show me where the AI failed. Show me the three possibilities you uncovered. Show me the part that still requires experience, expertise, or human judgment.
The defining divide of the AI era may not be human versus machine. It may not even be AI users versus non-AI users. It may be between people who encounter something they don't know and stop, and people who encounter something they don't know and start.
Artificial intelligence did not invent resourcefulness, curiosity, or good judgment. What it has done is put an extraordinarily powerful set of tools behind those human qualities, and made their absence much easier to see.
That may ultimately be one of AI's biggest impacts on humanity. Not that machines become capable of doing more, but that once they do, we begin expecting more from one another.
And when we begin expecting more, what we expect is no longer just information. We expect a higher degree of the human experience from our relationships, one that cannot be replicated by AI alone. Demonstrating that you will wield your expertise and judgment to help people in ways a machine never can may redefine what value means between people who work together.
About TruLegal
TruLegal (formerly TRU Staffing Partners) is an award-winning global leader in delivering bespoke AI-enabled talent solutions for modern legal teams. With a network of relationships reaching over 100,000 legal professionals across 75+ countries, TruLegal has successfully placed thousands of attorneys, legal operations, litigation & eDiscovery, data privacy, cybersecurity and other legal professionals who focus on the intersection of technology and the law. For over fifteen years, TruLegal has provided flexible contract talent, direct hire contingency staffing, and executive level search services to the Fortune 1000, AmLaw 200, and the community of providers that support the legal industry.
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