The AI Leadership Trap with Tatiana Ferreira

Is AI making you a lazy thinker? In this episode of Daring Breakthroughs, host Jenn Landis sits down with transformation executive and AI governance expert Tatiana Ferreira to discuss the evolving landscape of leadership in the age of AI. While many professionals are focused on adopting new tools, the real challenge lies in maintaining original thought and critical thinking.

Tati shares her powerful 70-30 framework, explaining that while AI can handle the bulk of "busy work," there is a vital 30% that only humans can do: tasks requiring judgment, nuance, and compassion. We dive deep into why you should never outsource your thinking to a machine and how to use AI as a "challenge partner" to identify blind spots and shoot holes in your strategic plans. If you want to gain a competitive edge and lead with unstoppable confidence, you cannot afford to relegate your executive functioning to an algorithm.

In This Episode, We Cover:

💡The Shift in Leadership: Why the "economy of output" is ending and the "economy of judgment" is beginning.
💡The 70-30 Framework: Understanding the specific 30% of work that requires a human touch.
💡The Danger of Outsourcing Thought: Why relying on AI for original ideas is a "warning" for modern executives. 
💡AI as a Sparring Partner: How to use "alien intelligence" to challenge your hypotheses and find blind spots. 
💡The Tati Test: A practical experiment to improve your AI prompts this week.

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TIMESTAMPS
00:00 — Introduction to Daring Breakthroughs 
00:53 — Meet Tatiana Ferreira 
02:13 — How AI is Changing Leadership 
03:51 — The 70-30 Framework 
04:40 — The Danger of Outsourced Thinking 
07:55 — AI as "Alien Intelligence" 
09:33 — Using AI for Career Reinvention 
10:13 — The Role of Dissent 
12:12 — This Week’s Tiny Tweak: The Tati Test 
12:46 — Closing and Resources

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📚 Resources Mentioned in the Episode
Break Up. Break In. Breakthrough. — Jenn Landis

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Let’s Connect
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Connect with Tatiana Ferreira: Find Tati’s company and learn more about her work in transformation, AI governance, and executive leadership.
🌐 HarmonIQ Consulting: https://www.beharmoniq.com/
🚀 Aurora AI Retail Accelerator: https://blueskyai.co/pages/aurora
💬 Connect with Tatiana Ferreira: 
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tatianaferreira/
Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/tatiana_g_ferreira/

➡️ If this episode resonated with you, please LIKE the video, SUBSCRIBE for more Daring Breakthroughs, and COMMENT below with a moment when you said “yes” before you felt fully ready.
#CareerReinvention #LeadershipMindset #AILeadership #ProfessionalGrowth #DaringBreakthroughs

Transcript

0:00

This is both a warning for folks out there, but also an invitation to really challenge yourself, not to outsource your thinking, to continue to drive original thought. Welcome to Daring Breakthroughs, the podcast that is obsessed with helping professionals at all levels build unstoppable confidence, gain crystal clarity, and create powerful networking connections, to create a competitive edge. We share practical strategies and inspiring stories from daring people who have achieved remarkable breakthroughs. I know that if you can see it, you can be it, because I navigated my own career from Walmart to Wall Street, and my friend, you can too. I'm your host and the author of Break Up. Break In. Breakthrough, Jenn Landis. Welcome back, everyone. I am back with Tati Ferreira, a transformation executive and board member who works with leadership teams on enterprise transformation and AI governance. This is part two of my conversation with Tati In part one, we explored reinvention and the courage to say yes. Today we're shifting the lens to leadership and AI. Um, I want to talk about one of the aspects of your business and your thought leadership that is totally enamoring to me. You know me well, and you know that I'm very AI forward. That I think there is a lot of opportunity with AI if used responsibly, appropriately, um and that there's so much experimentation and, and just some neat things that are happening in the world of AI. And I don't know anyone who is better informed. in all of that than you. So I can't wait to dig into some of your work there. So, I'd love to know from your perspective, how has AI changed leadership? What does it mean to be an effective leader, um, in a world of AI, beyond just like adopting new tools? I think that's a really important question, and it's a question that is still, uh, I, I believe the answer I'm giving you applies to something that is still in motion. So we don't, we, it is not necessarily, you know, it's not fully deployed, and it's fully in motion, it's not fully deployed. Um. Yeah. Leadership used to reward having all the answers and having the expertise, and AI shifts that to a very different set of leadership qualities and starts to reward judgment a lot more. Hmm. Um. Leaders will still have a choice. They will just have more options. They'll have better options. In my belief, they already have better options if AI is deployed appropriately. There's a, a part of me that believes that that's going to be reduced tremendously. There's part of me that hopes that it will be the end of busy work, that'll be the end of the output culture of output for the sake of output. Hmm. Productivity for the sake of producing something. Uh, something is not enough. It has to be the right something. It has to have the quality. And as leaders, I think we'll be looked at more and more and more to drive what this new economy is. How leaders will be looked at, and how we are going to manage and how you're going to steer and how you're going to shepherd people through this change. So, I think leadership has been elevated in so many different ways, um, that, you know, the 30% that only humans can do. I have my 70-30 framework. Uh, there's 30% that only humans can do well. Uh, leaders will be very challenged there. And the leader that thinks that AI is going to automate, that is in for a, a rude awakening. So I was talking Tati to um, a PhD friend of mine who's an executive coach, um. This insight I'm going to share with you is not grounded in a specific study. It's just observational data that she related to me that I found was fascinating. And she said that as she's been working with some of the up-and-coming executives in her practice, that she's actually seeing a reduction in the executive functioning of the brain and the ability to think really critically. She believes in part because of the never out of your sight, um, never far from your hand cell phone, and, you know, answers that are Googleable even before AI. And so it's, it's had me thinking about. Wow, if you try to relegate your thinking to AI, I can see how you would actually become a, a less critical thinker, which is the exact opposite of what we need from leaders in an age of AI where AI can do so many things. We do need to be critical thinkers, and we need to be careful and question everything to make sure that we actually do agree and that it's headed in the right direction, right? It, it takes a lot of oversight. I had another woman tell me that think of AI as the most skilled intern you've ever worked with, I mean, how important is it that leaders make sure that they, they are being critical in their evaluation, and how do we guard ourselves against this desire to want to delegate thinking to AI? It is, uh, it almost sounds like you watched our podcast episode a couple weeks ago. We talked exactly about this topic. Uh, my position in this is very very black and white. We cannot outsource our thinking. Yeah. Period. You moment, you're outsource your thinking. It's going to be very tempting to your point. Um, I taught a class, a group of MBA students a few weeks ago, where I said, it's going to be very tempting to outsource your thinking because it's very easy. Hmm. To outsource your thinking, but that is precisely what you have that works and gets augmented by AI. And I'm not talking about, by the way, using AI to polish your work. Everyone should be, but I can go on LinkedIn and in eight, eight out of 10 times, I can tell if a post was completely written by AI because there's no original thought. Hmm. Uh. There's a lot of, sometimes they're quite long, and you read them, and you finish, and you go, what was this? What did you say? What was your point of view? What is your stance? So I think that no different than before, the best leaders and leadership is not uh, you know, is not elevated by picking the middle lane. You know, if you don't make decisions, if you don't take a stance, if you don't have a position, it doesn't go very far. Um, you can hide for a little while, but it doesn't go too far. And I think in the very same way with AI, it's only going to be clear faster who is, who is in fact still producing a original thought, who is in fact still, uh, um. Not, you know, not outsourcing their thinking. AI is and will continue to be the most powerful tool when it augments the human thinking. Uh, there are certain qualities of our thinking and, you know, we could have a philosophical discussion about how that's going to change over time. Although, I agree with your friend, and I've heard this many times, it's kind of like an intern. It's actually better than an intern now, and in some cases it might be smarter than us in some things, and it's okay. We did an episode where we talked about AI being alien intelligence, which is really important because keep trying to look for human qualities in it. When we should be doing the opposite. I, my belief, the best, uh, minds out there are doing the opposite. They're utilizing what's best about this alien intelligence and what's best about our human mind.

What we bring: 8:18

the compassion, the taste, the ability, the judgment, the ability to look at something and understand the nuance of it, that only in the human side can be understood. And there's a list of things that hold true to that versus trying to make the machine similar to us. Uh, and I think that that's, uh, without getting too philosophical, I think it's at the bottom of, of all of that. And I think, what folks are getting wrong about that is, and it's, and again, we're going to see, there's many examples. I have a friend of mine that has recently shared with me that she paid tens of thousands of dollars for a marketing review and got a Straight outta Chat GPT deck. Um, without real original thought. This is both a warning for folks out there, like we can tell first of all, and we can see that, but also an invitation to really challenge yourself, not to outsource your thinking, to continue to drive original thought. So we'll, um, link that podcast episode in the show notes so that people can go from this one straight to that one, Um, and I did not hear it. I missed it, but I'm going to go listen to it now, Tati, um, I'd like to marry these two concepts together, so AI and reinvention. Um. And then we'll close out. You've been so generous with your time today, but I want to know if you could look back at a younger version of yourself, a version of yourself that understood AI and had the abilities that you have today at your fingertips with AI. How could you have used AI appropriately to help you with your reinvention? I find one of the aspects, if I can mention one. I think there are many. Um, but one of the aspects in which I find AI absolutely fascinating is when it plays the role, and I actually have it play this role often, uh, is when it can play the role of descent. If I'm talking about an idea, if I'm talking about a, a project, if I'm talking about a theory, a hypothesis, a sparring partner that is incredibly smart, learns on the go, is able to, uh, talk to you very openly, and is able to draw from unlimited resources. Uh, I find that to be, you know, the, the ability that it has to open up for blind spots that you may have so fast. Hmm. So, uh, effectively, and while it may not have the answers, the fact that it is, uh, able to draw, essentially shoot the holes through your plan, through your idea, and I find that to be a, an incredible, uh, feature of AI and how it lives today. And I absolutely wish I've had that before. I love that, using it as a challenge partner. You know, so often we, we have our challenge friends, and they're so concerned about hurting our feelings, and they don't want to, you know, um, come across as though they're unsupportive. Right? And so they don't. They don't always shoot straight with us because they love us, and I love that they love us, and they want to protect our egos and our, our sometimes what they view to be kind of a fragile state of mind, when what we really need in order to reinvent, in order to break through. We need that tough love, right? And we, and we can accept it from an AI far better than we can accept it sometimes from another human person, right? Because we do wonder, well, what are their motives, and are they not supportive? And you remove all of that emotional baggage when you use AI as the partner that's going to challenge you and shoot holes in your ideas. So, I absolutely love that. You know, Tati, I wouldn't have said that but I actually do find myself doing that, and so I think I could be more intentional. So I'm all about tiny tweaks. So I'm going to encourage our audience this week, you're probably already using AI for many different things. I'm going to challenge you to make a tiny tweak to your AI practice this week and use it to challenge you in some way. Take the Tati test, we're going to call it, and let AI challenge you and see what, what happens as a result of that. I know I would love to hear the result of your little experiment, and I'm sure Tati would too. You can find us on socials. We'll have all of that, um, the the show notes for you. Tati gave us a lot to think about today. So as you think about what you heard reflect on where you might be outsourcing your thinking. I know I will. And where you need to stay firmly in the driver's seat. So, everyone, thank you so much for joining Tati and I for this episode of Daring Breakthroughs. If you found value, and I believe you did. I invite you to review to like, to subscribe, and remember to check the description in the show notes for free tools and the resources that we mentioned today. Let's stay connected. You'll find me everywhere at Ask Jenn Landis. That's Jenn with two Ns. And if you need a speaker for your next event, visit jennlandis.com or if you need an AI speaker, you can check out Tatiana and we'll have all of that information in the show notes. Until next time, share one insight you gained today with a friend and make one bold move. I dare you.