5 Lessons from ‘Lead like a Human in the Age of AI’

Last week I was invited by Rita Cincotta onto the Deliberate Leader Podcast. If you don’t know Rita, she is a is a leadership coach and who helps leaders grow through strengths-based practice, reflection, and deliberate action.

She’s also a trusted colleague and an old friend. We were able to quickly get into deep conversation about the overlap of our two worlds.

Here are 5 takeaways we uncovered during our conversation, on Leadership in the Age of AI:

1. Use AI for the work that drains you, not the work that defines you

AI is at its best when it handles the repetitive, mechanical, time-consuming parts of leadership. Meeting summaries, action items, and information synthesis are all tasks that can eat up hours, without necessarily drawing on your deepest strengths. AI does a lot of that heavy lifting quickly, which gives leaders more room for the work that actually requires a human being in the chair.

Leadership is not at its best when it is preoccupied with administration. Leadership is judgment, conversation, direction, and discernment. The value of a leader is not in how many notes they can type, or how many follow-up emails they can send. The value of a leader is how well they help people move forward. AI can support that work, but it should not replace the human faculties that make leadership worth following in the first place.

2. The real advantage of AI is not automation, it is better thinking

Most people approach AI as a productivity tool, which is an important contribution, but I think the more important use case for leaders is strategic thinking. In the interview, we talked about using AI to role-play difficult conversations, explore options, test language, and prepare for moments that carry emotional or political weight. That kind of rehearsal can make a leader more deliberate before they walk into the room.

This is where Voice Mode becomes especially useful. Instead of waiting until you are back at your desk, you can think out loud while walking, driving, or decompressing between meetings. You can use AI as a sounding board, a coach, or a rehearsal partner. For leaders who are short on time, that turns dead time into reflection space, which is often where the best decisions begin.

3. Human leadership becomes more valuable as AI gets more capable

The stronger AI becomes, the more important human direction becomes. In our conversation, I noted that AI can do many of the mechanics of leadership, but it cannot determine whether it is moving in the right direction. That requires intention. It requires values. It requires a person who can decide what matters, what kind of future they are building, and what tradeoffs they are willing to accept.

This is why I keep coming back to the human role in ethical judgment and creative taste. AI can generate options at speed, but it cannot hold direction, or responsibility, in the way a leader must. The more powerful the tool, the more precious that human steering function becomes. In a world where machines can go in almost any direction at great speed, choosing the right direction is the highest and most meaningful work.

4. Leaders need to model experimentation, not perfection

If teams are going to learn how to use AI well, they need permission to try, to fail, adjust, and try again. One of the most controversial points I made in the interview was that leaders should be willing to fail publicly. That does not mean being reckless. It means being visible in the learning process. When a leader says, “I tried this, it flopped, here’s what I learned,” they lower the social risk for everybody else.

That kind of modeling creates psychological safety, and psychological safety is what makes experimentation possible. The organizations that learn fastest will not be the ones with the most polished policy documents. They will be the ones where people are allowed to test responsibly, share what worked, and speak openly about what did not. Progress in AI will come less from pretending to be certain, and more from building cultures that can learn in stumbling motion.

5. The future belongs to people who can think broadly and deeply

If AI gives everyone access to more knowledge, then our differentiator is no longer having access to information. The differentiator becomes what you can do with it. That means the humanities become more important. Having the ability to connect ideas across domains can give us a unique capability, when we all have access to infinite information.

We have spent years rewarding narrow specialization. Expertise still matters, especially in the final stretch where quality, taste, and mastery make the difference. But leaders in an AI-powered world also need range. They need to interpret, synthesize, and make meaning across contexts. The best operators of AI will not just be specialists with prompts. They will be thoughtful generalists, with good judgment.