Deepening Trust & Building FBI-Level Influence in the Age of AI

http://www.sherylkline.com/blog

There's a moment when women executives recognize: you're not in the room where strategic decisions are being made, not part of the ‘club’. Maybe you are in the room, but you realize your voice doesn’t carry the weight it should. As AI reshapes how business gets done, that moment is becoming more frequent, and stakes are higher.

Your wisdom, experience, knowledge, and integrity don’t deserve to be heard, it must be heard. Let’s make sure you not only have a seat at the table, but have a voice at the table.

That's the focus of my upcoming session at the #EmpoweredCXO retreat, an event I'm honored to help shape alongside 6sense and Claire Couch. It takes an enormous amount of coordination to build a retreat like this... the kind of behind-the-scenes work that rarely gets seen but makes everything possible. I'm grateful to be part of it.

The session is called Deepening Trust & Building FBI-Level Influence in the Age of AI: A 90-Day Plan to Recruit, Reign, or Reimagine What's Next. It's built around four ideas that I believe will define effective leadership over the next decade.

1. Architect your agency.
So much of leadership erodes quietly... through deferring to consensus, softening instincts to keep the peace, or letting a title define your confidence instead of your judgment. Reclaiming agency starts with refining emotional intelligence and learning to trust what you already know. Leaders who do this consistently become the people others can't replace, not because of their role, but because of how they think and show up.

2. Build trust... the new currency.
As AI absorbs more of the transactional work... analysis, drafting, forecasting... the differentiator left for humans is connection. In an AI-saturated world, the leaders and organizations that win will be the ones who can build deep, authentic relationships that no algorithm can replicate. Trust isn't a soft skill anymore. It's the asset.

3. Command any room.
Influence isn't manipulation... it's precision. Techniques borrowed from FBI-level negotiation and persuasion training aren't about pressure tactics; they're about building instant credibility, lowering defenses, and creating the conditions where the right people are willing to move. This is a learnable skill, not an innate trait, and it's one of the fastest ways to change how you show up in high-stakes conversations.

4. Decode what people really want.
Every negotiation, pitch, or hard conversation has a surface layer and a real one. Objections are rarely the actual objection. Needs go unspoken more often than they're stated. The leaders who consistently get to "yes" are the ones who've learned to read past the words to the true motivation underneath... and respond to that instead.

Put together, these four ideas form a 90-day framework: a practical runway to recruit the right people, reign in a room with confidence, or reimagine what leadership looks like for you next. It's not about becoming someone else. It's about sharpening the instincts and skills you already have, so your voice carries the weight it deserves.

I can't wait to share more! See you in the room.

To your next level of impact and joy,

Sheryl

P.s. If you have any comments, questions, or would like to bring a similar event into your organization, please email me directly at sheryl@sherylkline.com