A $1.25 Billion AI CEO Is Rethinking Experience — and Why That’s Putting Older Workers Under Pressure
Hiring assumptions inside fast-growing tech companies are starting to shift, and that shift is quietly putting experience itself under pressure.
As artificial intelligence flattens skill advantages, long-held ideas about who should be hired, promoted, or trusted are being re-examined — especially for workers whose value has traditionally been tied to years on the job rather than adaptability.
Speaking to Fortune, Ricardo Amper, founder and CEO of AI identity-verification company Incode Technologies, said that deep prior knowledge can sometimes work against innovation.
“I think too much knowledge is actually bad in tech: you’re biased,” Amper said, explaining why he increasingly hires Gen Z workers at his $1.25 billion company. His view lands at a moment when experience no longer guarantees relevance, and when the pressure created by that shift is starting to spread well beyond Silicon Valley.
The Real Impact
At Incode, Amper argues that younger employees bring something harder to train later: a lack of assumptions. “Coming out with a fresh mind, first principles, is important,” he told Fortune. “That’s why young people are particularly helpful in tech, because they’re less biased.”
The implication is not that experience is useless, but that it no longer guarantees advantage. In an AI-accelerated workplace, access to information is no longer scarce.
What differentiates workers is how they approach problems when the playbook is unclear or incomplete. For companies building products that did not exist a few years ago, inherited knowledge can sometimes narrow rather than expand the range of possible solutions.
This shift reframes how value is assigned inside organisations. If experience is no longer the default filter for hiring or promotion, then credentials, tenure, and linear career paths carry less weight. For younger workers, that opens doors earlier. For companies, it creates a larger, cheaper, and more flexible talent pool. But it also unsettles long-standing expectations about how careers are supposed to progress.
Where the Pressure Is Building
The pressure created by this thinking does not fall on Gen Z. It lands on everyone else.
Mid-career professionals, in particular, are exposed. Many built their advantage on accumulated domain knowledge and institutional memory. If AI tools can replicate parts of that expertise instantly, the justification for seniority shifts from what someone knows to how they think, adapt, and lead. That is a more ambiguous and harder-to-measure standard.
Hiring managers are also under strain. Traditional signals — years of experience, previous titles, elite degrees — are easy to screen for. Evaluating “first-principles thinking” and bias-free problem-solving is not. Amper acknowledged this tension, noting that younger workers’ strengths must be counterbalanced. “It’s easier to find people who are unbiased as young people,” he said, “but you have to balance that, because also you’re going to find people who are less emotionally proficient.”
That balance introduces new risk. Companies that lean too heavily toward youth may sacrifice judgment and resilience. Those that cling to experience may move slower than competitors willing to experiment.
Either way, the old equilibrium — experience as the primary proxy for competence — is no longer stable.
What Happens Next
Amper’s view is not isolated. Other AI leaders have made similar arguments, suggesting that creativity and curiosity matter more than having done the job before. The difference now is timing. As AI tools become embedded across workflows, the cost of being wrong shrinks, while the cost of being rigid grows.
The next phase will test whether this philosophy scales beyond elite tech firms. Large organisations with compliance obligations, legacy systems, and reputational risk may struggle to adopt hiring models that de-emphasise experience. Yet they face their own pressure: younger workers who expect faster responsibility, and competitors who are willing to take bets on unconventional talent.
What remains unresolved is whether this shift produces a new hierarchy or simply reshuffles the old one. If experience loses value, what replaces it as the marker of authority? Judgment, character, and perseverance are harder to quantify, but Amper insists they matter more. “What I look for is grit,” he told Fortune. “People who have a proven ability to have integrity and character is something that I really care about, because entrepreneurship is mostly about perseverance and character and adversity.”
The Bottom Line
This is not a debate about Gen Z versus older workers. It is a signal that the definition of “qualified” is being rewritten under the influence of AI. Experience still matters — but not in the way it used to, and not on its own.
For workers, the message is uncomfortable but clear: past success does not guarantee future relevance. For companies, the risk cuts both ways. Betting on inexperience may unlock speed and creativity, but it also demands stronger leadership and clearer judgment at the top.
What Amper’s comments reveal is less about one CEO’s hiring preference and more about a system in transition. When knowledge becomes cheap and tools become powerful, certainty loses its edge. In that environment, the advantage may belong to those willing to admit what they don’t know — and build from there.
