Role debt
dette de rôle
The accumulated obligation to redefine roles that drifted faster than the contracts describing them. A person's work moves toward AI engineering without anyone having decided it, and the shift appears nowhere: not in their contract, not in their training plan, not in the org chart, not in the objectives they are assessed on.
Because no role is designated, no boundary of expected mastery exists either. Everyone learns on their own, at unequal levels, and each person develops their own way of checking outputs, writing instructions and correcting errors. Those divergences are what turn ordinary work into engineering work nobody contracted for.
It sits in the debt family deliberately. AI debt is the obligation to remediate artefacts produced faster than they were validated; role debt is the obligation to redefine the roles that produced them. Like any debt it has a principal, a rate and a debtor, which is what makes it measurable rather than merely observed.
Do not confuse it with role drift, which identity and access management already uses for the accumulation of stale permissions. The two describe different objects in adjacent fields.
What it means for an SME running AI
The work moved. The contract did not. Every hour spent on a task that was never assigned is a cost your accounts cannot see, and an exposure your job descriptions do not cover.
Sources
- Terrain vérifié libre en août 2026. À ne pas confondre avec le « role drift » de la gestion des identités, qui désigne la dérive des droits d'accès.
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