Stop Telling Leaders To Be More Human
I use AI most days. Mostly to pressure-test my thinking. It's a great sounding board for ideas and saves me hours a week.
Yet every time I read another article announcing that "in the age of AI, leaders must become more human," I want to close the laptop. The line is usually spruiked by a thought leader with a program to sell.
I see AI as a tool, a revolutionary one, in the same way Microsoft Excel revolutionised business in the 90s. It's surprising how many billion-dollar companies still run on a spreadsheet Barry put together over a decade ago. Excel never ran those companies, though. Barry's boss did.
Sully’s call
In January 2009, US Airways Flight 1549 lost both engines to a flock of geese. Captain Chesley "Sully" Sullenberger had roughly three and a half minutes to decide what to do with 155 people on board. Remarkably, he put the plane down on the Hudson River. Everyone survived.
Investigators later found that some simulator pilots made it back to an airport, but only if they turned the instant the birds hit. Add a realistic delay for a human to recognise the problem and those returns failed.
The simulation had perfect information, hindsight and no fear. Sullenberger had smoke, noise, a failing aircraft and seconds to work out where to land the plane.
AI works a lot like that simulator. It calculates the tidy answer with all the data laid out and nothing at stake. Leaders decide in the moment, with half the picture, and they carry the outcome. The tool can give you an answer. It can't give you judgement.
Old news
Every major shift in how work gets done has produced the same argument in different typefaces. In 1958, the Harvard Business Review published "Management in the 1980s," forecasting that computers would hollow out middle management. We still have middle managers.
Technology does replace people. A century ago, a large share of the workforce worked the land. Today it's a small fraction. The tractor didn't help the farmhand. It replaced him. Someone still decided what to plant, when to sell and who to keep on when the season turned bad. The tractor never chose the crop. No one asserted the farmer needed to become more human to survive it.
AI will replace some roles too. I spent years leading a finance team. We poured hours into never-ending reports, rounds of analysis and the annual report. AI can now produce all of that in the time it takes to grab a coffee, and it will probably be read by just as few people.
What AI can't do is take the reins on decisions. A model's brain is a library of inputs. It can't predict the future. Humans can't either, but judgement lets a leader draw on insight and experience. AI is taking a stab in the dark.
Speed still matters in leadership. It's the speed of a sound call under pressure, not the speed of a finished report.
Blind spots
AI can now sit in on a meeting, transcribe every word and tell you who spoke the most. It can't tell you why the person who agreed first agreed so quickly. It doesn't know the operations team is still raw from last year's redundancies, or that the CEO says "let's explore that" when she means no. The context that matters most rarely makes it into the transcript.
It also can't be accountable, as one story doing the rounds online shows. A developer named Sirio asked OpenAI's GPT-6 Astra, an AI model, to generate 59 videos through his API account. It did, and he logged off. By morning, more than 500 extra videos had been generated and $5,000 had drained from his account. Astra insisted it hadn't done anything.
The bill landed with Sirio. Accountability has always sat with a person, and AI is unlikely to change that.
Secret herbs and spices
You can't lead a bot. You can't motivate it or earn its trust. You can only check its work, the same way leaders have always checked the work of any tool or adviser.
Deciding what to give it is part of that job. Some companies are feeding proprietary knowledge into these systems with reckless abandon: pricing models, client insights, the processes that took years to refine. They're handing over the secret herbs and spices for a monthly subscription.
Knowing what stays in the building has always been a leadership call. It still is.
People follow people
People don't commit to a strategy. They commit to the person asking them to carry it out.
Think about the best leader you've worked for. You probably can't recall a single report they wrote. You remember the time they backed you, the phone call when a loved one was in hospital, or the hard conversation others had avoided for years.
Trust is built in small moments: keeping your word, owning your mistakes, showing up when things go badly. A bot can write a heartfelt message, but your team can tell the difference between words that were produced and words that were meant. AI can script a difficult conversation. It can't sit across the table and hold the discomfort.
None of this is new. AI simply strips away the busywork that let some leaders hide from it.
AI intolerance
Business succeeds on relationships, with staff, stakeholders and customers alike. At business school I was taught that people buy people.
That's why I scroll past every AI-generated ad I see. I'm instantly repelled, and my opinion of the business spruiking it drops with it.
Customers can tell when they're being processed rather than served. Your board, staff and partners can too.
Fear and cure
Every technology shift produces two waves of content. The first sells fear. The second sells the cure. "Leaders must become more human" is the cure being sold right now.
If your leaders were leading like machines before AI arrived, you have a problem that predates the technology. No workshop on "human-centred leadership in the AI era" will fix years of poor selection, weak development and avoided conversations.
Leadership doesn't need to become more human. Leadership has only ever been human. What's changing is the equipment in the shed.
Use it
Let AI draft the board paper, summarise the engagement survey and challenge your assumptions. Tools buy efficiency, and efficiency buys time. AI doesn't require us to be more human. It gives us the time to be human, and to do more of what good leaders are already doing.
Keep these three things for yourself as AI takes on more of the work. They're what has always made leadership human:
The decision. AI can present options. The choice belongs to you.
The relationship. Connection and conversation are where leadership happens. Spend the time AI frees up here.
The example. Your team takes its cues from how you lead, not from what the tool produces. If you start saying "the tool recommended it" and moving on, they will too, and your credibility goes with it.
AI can tell you what has happened. Only a leader can decide what happens next.
