right. Apprentices will always grow, and so too must you, if you want to keep being paid. Their job is to come with new tools and new ideas, and your job is to keep a wider view into what you're doing and why, maintaining trust (you need to build the authority to tell apprentices no when their ideas might flood the customer's house), and keep moving towards other parts of the business and solving harder problems (working with sales, hiring, etc to manage customers and apprentices). AI will not build authority for you.

If your argument is that the customer themselves could use an AI or whatever to learn plumbing, that was always an option (libraries, google, youtube). They pay you so they don't have to worry about flooding their house (or at least have someone else to blame).

They might be able to "one shot" simple fixes that you might previously have assigned to an apprentice, but believe me, AIs are not about to start doing complex things for the layman that actually required seniors previously in either programming or plumbing, because very few of those things were just "type better into a computer". (build trust, speak confidently, know what doesn't work, take responsibility, test without breaking systems, communicate and work together with other professionals, have opinions)