A few weeks ago, I watched a manager run a team meeting with ChatGPT suggesting action plans on her laptop. She was calm, focused—not typing, just listening and asking the occasional pointed question. The AI outlined next steps and drafted follow-up emails in real time.

But here’s the thing. The meeting felt… alive. Team members opened up about worries, disagreed, even joked. It wasn’t frictionless, but it was productive, because someone nudged tensions into insight and ambiguity into action.

This left me wondering: in the rush to automate everything, what’s getting overlooked? Not just task delegation, but the subtle calibration of trust, motivation, and perspective—the invisible labor of leadership. AI will keep leveling up, but as it pulls the routine work off our plates, it exposes what only the best humans do: sense the emotional undercurrents, make brutal trade-offs, build trust in chaos.

AI-empowered leaders aren’t replaced—they’re amplified. But the skills that matter most are moving up the ladder: reading the room, thinking in second and third-order effects, holding paradoxes. The hardest upgrades are human ones.

This isn’t about fearing obsolescence. It’s about realizing the more tools become superhuman, the more we’ll be measured by how well we wield them—and what new strengths we choose to build. Read More