The Human Advantage: Leadership Lessons from the AI Frontier

The most important intelligence in the age of AI isn't artificial. It's the kind that comes from being human, leading people, and learning in the field. In this episode of Lessons from the Field, host Paige Williams gathers practitioners from the frontlines of AI transformation to share what they're actually discovering as they navigate this shift in real time.

Joining Paige are Amanda Manna, Vice President of Strategic Relations at Singularity University; Darlene Damm, entrepreneur and global impact leader who launched the world's first drone transport company for healthcare goods; Diana Verde Nieto, third-time entrepreneur and co-founder of Edify Collective, an AI-native coaching app built for frontline teams; and Michaela Hackner, UX leader driving AI transformation across Indeed's R&D organization.

Together they explore the tension between automation pressure and human skill development, why the rush to replace people with agents may ultimately undermine the markets businesses depend on, and what capacities like empathy, honesty, purpose, and agency no algorithm can replicate. This is leadership intelligence earned from experience, not extracted from data. And right now, that's the advantage that matters most.

Transcript

SPEAKER_03 0:00

AI is advancing faster than most organizations can keep up. But the real leadership question is not what AI can do. It is what humans must remain responsible for. Welcome to Lessons from the Field. I'm Paige Williams, transformational guide, executive coach, and author of the 12 creative keys. Together we explore what human leadership looks like in an exponential age. Let's get right into the conversation.

SPEAKER_02 0:27

My name is Amanda Mana, and I'm vice president of strategic relations at Singularity University. And we are a community of people around the world who believe that technology can help solve some of our biggest global challenges, but only if we have the leadership to harness the power for good and apply that in the right way. I think it's really about confronting fear and helping people try to find their way back to optimism as we go through this journey that nobody knows exactly how it will unfold. But it seems like it's hard to keep pace. There's lots of bad news and it's very overwhelming for a lot of people right now.

SPEAKER_04 1:07

I'm Darlene Daum. I started my career in the nonprofit sector working in social impact. And then in 2011 joined Singularity University and launched the world's first drone transport company for healthcare goods. And then after that, have spent the last um 10 to 15 years helping other startups use technology for good. And so when I think about where is humanity showing up, like me, there's a whole group of people who are using AI and technology to solve really challenging problems. And we don't hear about them as much, but they're working on preventing wildfires, they're helping make breakthroughs in fusion, they're helping nonprofits like predict problems before they start. So that's what I'm like super excited about.

SPEAKER_00 1:54

Hi, my name is Diana Verinieto. I'm an entrepreneur, a third-time entrepreneur. Um, I have worked at the intersection of innovation, sustainability, and technology for over 25 years. And now uh we're building Edify Collective, which is an AI native uh app that is a combination of performance support and a coach specifically for frontline teams. So we are completely industry agnostic, so we can help from doctors to retail to hospitality, and we're trying to make algorithm humans. I don't know if you know, but 80% of the world works in the frontline, and nobody is looking at them. So we want to make sure that they stay relevant, they stay healthy, and they stay uh and and they stay there versus being you know automated out of business.

SPEAKER_01 2:50

Awesome. It it reminds me of early in my career I was doing a lot of social impact and nonprofit work. I am not doing that now. I currently lead a large UX organization, so user experience design organization at Indeed. And over the past year, a lot of the work that we've done within my team has actually resulted in a lot of AI transformation work for the entire company. So initially we were focused on transforming the UX organization for the future, and then that work carried over to product organization, and now I'm leading the largest work stream across all of Indeed to transform our RD organization. And um, it's really interesting to me to be at this point in my career uh graduated when the internet was blowing up, and so um it feels very similar to it experiencing this great technology shift and feeling like we have to adapt and doing so in a meaningful way. And I think for me, the part where humanity is showing up the most in the work that I'm doing is I think a lot of companies are expecting their um their employees to use AI at all costs and you know, do it for everything. And I know some companies are actually measuring how frequently people are using AI and it's part of performance reviews and all sorts of things like that. And the way that we're thinking about integrating AI into the work is by being really human-centric about what are the biggest problems that we can solve with AI and what are the problems that we shouldn't be solving with AI. And the way that we've done that is introduced lots of pilots for different uses of AI and have been able to demonstrate through research where AI shines and where it maybe not is the best choice. And I think that's been really helpful in helping our leadership understand the value, but also maintaining the humanity of our teams and ensuring that they can do their best work.

SPEAKER_00 4:40

I think that the biggest point is the attention is when do we have a human in the loop? It's incredibly important to have human in the loops at all points. And the reason is that I don't buy this utopian way of AI will do everything. I also grew up with the internet and I saw this shift and transformation. And yes, of course, there will be business models that perhaps will disappear with the say in the same way, there will be other business models that will appear as a result of the use of AI. This idea that we don't need humans, that we all be replaced by agents, that agents can do better deals a little bit irrational. And the reason why is that when companies think about these in terms of okay, let's save money, let's make sure that we have agents, let's use AI in every single area that we can possibly have, they're killing their own market. If you have no humans earning money, you would have no families spending money. So if we follow this crazy path of okay, let's cut humans, who are going to buy your products, is the first question. And the second question is what would happen with 8.00 billion people, let's let's call it 30% of those who not have jobs. So is the blade runner? Shall we run for the caves? Because the only thing that we are setting humanity for, if that is the vision of the world, is failure, not success. And I believe that we are much better than that as humans. Um, so literally the work that we do is to work with leadership to really augment humans, to help humans to make more money for businesses, and for those humans not to be replaced by agents. We cannot tackle the entire organizations we're focusing on the uh on the front lines. But I really do believe that this this utopian vision of the world is we will all be replaced by robots and agents and so on will descend in a free fall for no one. That is my optimistic take of the world because I believe that humans not only play a role but play a central role in the development of humanity.

SPEAKER_04 6:56

I'm thinking about like what is the future of social impact, what is the future of nonprofits, this world is changing so rapidly. And on the one hand, you can use tools yourself to do the work that you're doing better, but on the other hand, there's these huge changes happening around us. And I think we have to pay attention to that. So drone warfare exists now, it's here. We have to respond. All of our lives will change no matter where we live in the world, right? There were big disruptions to the private market because they assumed that very large software companies are going to go out of business, huge companies that we assume would never go out of business. So there's all this rapid change happening, and technology and other forces are pulling everything apart right now. The nation state, all of these different things are crumbling, and we have to like put it all back together. The tension I feel is we have to focus on what's right in front of us, but we can't take our eyes off that bigger picture because it's so huge and important.

SPEAKER_02 7:56

What I'm seeing is a lot of tension between this idea that we want to automate everything and you need to pursue efficiency and find all of these gains that you can tie back to a bottom line with the reality of, well, the tools aren't all there yet. Figuring out how to put them together in that way is not easy. And you still have to have a lot of human expertise, both at the beginning of setting up a system, but then at the end of trying to vet what comes out of that system. And one of the things that's been that I've been thinking about a lot is what happens to skill development in this environment and what are the points of friction that we have to be intentional about building into how we work with AI so that we're not effectively surrendering our own capabilities to the machine. And I think that's something that we're starting to see some data around and like really understand what skills we need to focus on and how to use AI as a collaborator and not just something we outsource to, but that that's something we certainly don't know exactly the right approaches yet. And I so I think being um thoughtful and intentional about how we move forward and taking our time to explore, like within your own organization and context, where are the right ways, not only to find that value, but also to make sure you haven't given up too much.

SPEAKER_01 9:17

It comes down to what we build and why we build it. So, really the decision-making piece, you know, I think as you mentioned, AI can really augment thinking. And one of our um our VP of AI likes to talk a lot about the idea of abundance and how AI can ultimately augment and help increase the value that people are bringing collaboratively with AI. And I think the thing that I've noticed the most as it relates to like AI and um this tension that we're talking about is that because you can build things or do things so much more quickly, people are creating things much more quickly without actually doing the critical thinking and doing that upfront decision-making, consensus, alignment, all those people skills and things that need to happen. There is a big tension between like how quickly we can actually deliver something versus are we getting alignment and making sure it's the right thing along the way. And so I keep coming back to coaching my teams and thinking about how we can build more critical thinking and decision-making ownership into the humans versus like decentralizing that to AI. And it's really hard because the people who are doing the most exciting things with AI, like you don't want to say, hey, please stop, you know, we don't want you to do this work, but because they can do it so quickly, they're forgetting to do that upfront critical thinking and using judgment and just letting the AI kind of run with it. And so I think it's the the balance between maintaining people's motivation while simultaneously making sure that we're we're staying focused and not forgetting all those human skills around consensus, alignment, grounding our decisions and data, all of that good stuff.

SPEAKER_04 10:53

I've been talking to a lot of people lately who are looking for jobs. And everyone says, I'm looking for something stable. And everyone's trying to find that big opportunity that looks very stable with somebody that they know. And I thought, like, actually, given all the chaos that's happening right now and how much stuff is changing, it's actually a better strategy to find something new, something young, something that's growing and gonna change because the old world's, you know, crashing down and the new stuff is coming up. And so our instinct is to find the stable. I mean, Michaela, you might know more about this working in the job-seeking world, but there's a lot of new opportunities right now.

SPEAKER_02 11:34

I think one thing that strikes me is what AI is not without bias. It's and how much people don't really realize that or they don't think about, you know, all of the tiny decisions that we make every day. And then when you try to encode those in a machine that goes on to make decisions, the second and third order implications of that. And we work a lot with leaders on trying to train them just to even be aware of this. Like that's a big step forward to think about how their biases might be impacting it. But it always strikes me how much of a surprise that is when you when you kind of walk someone through just the thought process behind how to make an algorithm and then thinking about what those outputs might be and maybe they're not comfortable for you and how quickly we can get pulled away and things start to feel abstract, and being able to put somebody right back in a situation where they are having to feel the outcome of a decision that an algorithm makes makes it brings it back to that human level really quickly. So it just strikes me how easy it is to lose sight of that.

SPEAKER_01 12:35

I was gonna build a little bit on what Darlene was saying about people looking for stability and where can you find that right now? And kind of a different lens to look at that is so I lead a team of about 40 people and I'm working with people across the company on AI things. And within my org, especially, I've noticed that the people who are clinging to the past and the old ways of working and are really like fiercely like grabbing onto those and saying, like, no, this is so important, we have to do it this way, are the most unhappy, they're the most scared, the most frustrated. They're having a harder time than the people on my team who are getting out in front and saying, actually, I want to write this story. I have agency here, I want to play with this thing, I want to explore how it could be uniquely valuable to the work that I do and to start stretching into different places. Those people are thriving. Every day, we've gone through a lot of transition over the last um several years at my company. And it's been hard for people, I think, across the tech industry to feel that sense of stability. And it's it's wowing me that the leadership and the people who are stepping up to do this work or to help at least define how it shows up in our company and the ways that we practice design. Those people are the ones who are like really, really doing well and energized and motivated and their faces are lit up with smiles almost every time I talk to them. And so I think there's something in there about, you know, knowing that there's going to be constant change and flux and the change is happening faster than ever. But I'm not saying you have to embrace it, but I think be part of that story and help create it. I think that will be really important as for leaders as we continue to evolve in this world.

SPEAKER_00 14:14

Um, I have a slightly different take on this because for me, when perhaps organizations need to think about when's good to use AI, and actually when it's good to use the traditional all trial and tested methods. So we have an aging population globally. This is a fact. And if you think about our parents, probably in the 70s and 80s and 90s, talking to an agent on an AI agent is probably one of the most frustrating things ever, maybe to yourself. When you think this in a wider world and you think, okay, where the future will go, the future, the future of of of uh humanity is going to be human because that is the ultimate luxury. The ultimate luxury is to talk to a person that smiles on you and is polite to you and actually helps you to solve a problem, and the rest is commoditized. So perhaps to the listeners to the podcast, I urge them to think what kind of future do we actually want? Because no, we are not gonna be young forever. I would love that. And when you extrapolate these into what is you know the trajectory of the world, we will need more and more humans in the loop, younger humans in the loop, that will help us to solve basic problems that shouting at a computer or a phone ain't gonna solve the problem. So I think that we need to really think about what do we actually want the future to be, uh, not just right now, but you know, in 10 years' time. Because we're not all going to stay in the way that we are, and money is not gonna solve the problem. Empathy is the number one human capability and the ability to listen and the ability to have compassion. And I think that this is the things that will distinguish some on others, and this is not specifically female characteristics versus male characteristics. I think this is human characteristics, regardless of gender. Critical thinking is absolutely key for decision making and curiosity to what's new, what's out there, how do we get involved. Um, but I think that human leadership, it'll have to be um a lot more empathic than ever been before.

SPEAKER_01 16:29

I was also gonna say empathy because I see that as a huge asset for humans. And I think about it in terms of user centricity. So, in thinking about how we show up with our teams, how we show up in our organizations, and the way that we think about how AI should integrate into our lives.

SPEAKER_02 16:45

I was thinking also about um trust, and it feels like this wave of change is happening at a time when trust, you know, in institutions and around the world has been declining for a long time. And it kind of feels like we don't have the right support systems right now to deal with this kind of change. And but as leaders, individually, that's something that we all still have as our human opportunity to lead with trust and to instill trust in our teams and to be trustworthy. And so I feel that that is one principle that feels very human and true despite all of the change that's happening.

SPEAKER_01 17:21

One of the things that has really served me and the people that I know who are thriving in leadership roles is around just having more technical understanding of what these tools do and how they can be best leveraged because there's so much swirl, there's so much constant introduction of new AI technologies every day. And depending on what your role is in your organization, you may or may not have that technical expertise. But I think having knowing enough about how systems work and how things fit together, I think is really critical for you to be able to make better decisions about when and when not to introduce AI. And what I have found is when people who are who have less of that critical thinking or judgment skills are making those decisions, they make, they may not make the right ones. And so I think as a leader, just having a good understanding of how all of this stuff works and where it where it works well and where it doesn't is really important because the costs of integrating AI are really high, both on the human side, but also like on the budgets and whatnot. And so really understanding how it can all fit together and how to do it at scale in a way that is both human and really augmenting your workforce, but at the same time that you're not just buying into every single new technology that comes out every week.

SPEAKER_04 18:37

Conversation made me think about we have this word artificial intelligence, right? But like what is intelligence? And we've been surrounded by intelligence our whole lives. We, you know, whether it's us, other people, animals, plants, ecosystems, like so the intelligence has always been there and there's just more of it. And so I actually think what's changing is agency. Like, how do you apply that intelligence? And AI is a tool, but I wonder if the discussion is uh should be more around what are as humans, what are how is our agency changing? And that like it is huge because agency is how we express ourselves, right? And so maybe there's something there with agency and being human. Years ago, I saw this TED talk by a philosopher named Ruth Chang, and she spoke about how character develops by making hard decisions. And it's always stuck with me because she said, you know, you can weigh a decision, you know, should I wear the red sock or the blue sock? Or and you can come up with reasons, right? But at a certain point, like a decision is there are no reasons. It's equally good or equally bad. Or, and she said, at that point, you choose who you want to be. And when you choose who you want to be, do I do I want to live in Los Angeles or Boston? They're both great, but who do I want to be in the future? Then your character develops, right? Or if you have to make a hard decision about hurting somebody or something like that. And so we're outsourcing our decision makings, you know, everything from driving a car, what's the best route, to how should I write something? And so are we losing our character? I'm like super careful with using it. And that's hard to say because I know I'm using stuff that uses it and I don't even know that I'm using it. But like I don't I don't use navigation when I drive. I go to the store and get my own groceries. So I try to do a lot of stuff myself to be able to keep myself intact. But then sometimes I'll use it if I feel like this is a big like a research task, or I've tried to use it with editing and some it and like I feel like spell checking is correct, but other times it changes the tone so much of what I want to say that I don't choose to use it.

SPEAKER_00 20:46

So it's a choice that you make of what's important to you and what you would not want to let go. For me, I try to use AI when it will augment me, but not at the cost of making me less me. I'm intentional. I always, of course, English is not my first language, so I have you know spelling mistakes and I leave them. I don't want AI to correct me because that's who I am. I'm a foreigner that lives in the UK and I'm very proud of it because my English is almost perfect by hard work, but it's perfect because I speak another three languages, so it will never be so, but I'm happy with that.

SPEAKER_02 21:27

I had an experience recently where, well, I like I love to write. It is the best way for me to think things out and express myself. And so I don't really use AI to write like a lot of emails or things like that, but I was working on a big contract recently. And one of the things that I've observed with working with lawyers throughout my career is I find it kind of annoying when lawyers kind of want to like out red line each other and who's gonna be, you know, make the contract more difficult to get through. And I realized that the person I was negotiating. With clearly was using AI on their contract, and then I was using AI on my contract. And it was the most red-lined, ridiculous experience I've ever gone through. So I thought, man, I these two AI lawyers need to just take a step back and drop the ego because we're on, we're gonna get there at the end. But that was one where specifically I thought like the work output was not how I would have approached it, but I needed the expertise.

SPEAKER_01 22:25

Yeah, I work to live, not live to work. And so what I found over the last couple of years is in the tech industry, things have compressed. There's been lots of layoffs, there's a lot more work and fewer people to do it. So my to-do list and my responsibilities have grown exponentially. And I was finding that I was spending many more hours a day that doing work than I wanted to or that I felt like I should be doing. AI can really help me get to my ideas much more quickly. And if I look at what I was doing and how much time I was working a year ago, then the amount of time I'm working today, it's night and day. I feel like I have normal hours. I'm doing even more work, but I'm using AI to augment my time so that I can spend more of my life outside doing the things that I really want to be doing and less time being stressed about all the things that are on my to-do list. So it's been tremendous in helping me manage everything from native communications and updates to strategy documents, coaching me on how to have conversations with people that might be a little bit trickier. It has really helped me embrace more real life in my days.

SPEAKER_02 23:30

We can lead with a sense of wonder and curiosity and find ways to use the tools together that help us get further than we would have on our own. We all could be in this mode of experimentation and innovation and sharing ideas with each other that can help build trust among a team. And, you know, there's not a lot of distance right now between a leader's skill with AI and someone else on the team. It's really all up to the individual and how they've used it. That's also can level the playing field. Um, and to Michaela's point, people can be thriving who maybe wouldn't have shown up hierarchically the way that they're showing up with their skills. And in many ways, it's an exciting time to be leading a team and figuring this stuff out together.

SPEAKER_01 24:14

I always try to be a very humble and approachable and transparent leader, even more so now when there's so much uncertainty and there's a lot of fear working again, working in tech where people are worried that their jobs are going to be replaced and they don't know if if they they're expected to use AI. But then if they do it, does that mean that we don't need them to do that work anymore? Modeling learning publicly and that curiosity, and also um just the the fact that there are unknowns and regularly bring a lot of that upwards to senior leadership so they understand that maybe assumptions that are being shared with them. I have this theory that there's some sort of like private equity playbook that's circulating with all the C-suites and the big tech companies that basically is like, you're gonna get 40% of efficiency with your workforce. You're gonna be able to reduce your workforce by this much. And none of it's grounded in data. That doesn't exist yet. We believe that AI is gonna increase efficiency, but we have not been able to really demonstrate that yet. And so I think knowing that tension and knowing, you know, where, you know, wanting to look out for the people that I work with, it's it's a balance between trying out some of these things and just explaining that they're experiments, but also being quick to say, this is actually working or what this actually isn't working and this is why. And so I think keeping that transparency between the people who are using the tools and with leadership and making sure that you're letting both groups know that that those conversations are happening is really helpful in building trust that we're all kind of on the same page and we all have the same awareness. So for me, it's even practicing even more um like managing up and managing down and really aligning those folks. The other thing around decision making is AI really enables a lot more decentralized decision making. But what I've found is that also can create a lot of chaos because people who maybe don't necessarily think they have the abilities to make decisions because AI is helping them augment their expertise, maybe shouldn't be making those decisions. And when people seem really confident that they're ready to make a decision, you kind of have to probe a little bit further and say, like, okay, let's talk about this a little bit more, like this thing that you created. Did you vet it with an actual expert? And so I think as a leader, like not stifling that curiosity and that experimentation, but also being mindful that, you know, it could give a false sense of security that people actually have what they need to make those decisions.

SPEAKER_00 26:37

This uncertainty is not just in tech, it's in pretty much every single industry that exists today. Everybody has this fear that they will not be needed. And I think that AI is not just about having the job and earning money, it's also about not having a purpose to go and turn up to work and be part of a community, of a team, etc. One of the things I've noticed is that when people, like you said, make decisions, sometimes they practice with AI, but AI doesn't have an idea of what humans are like. They think they have an idea of what humans are like, but they cannot think laterally and they hallucinate like hell. You know, sometimes they predict an answer that is so far away from a human reaction because it's not grounded on experience, it's grounded on data and algorithms, but not on experience that perhaps the experience that you would never share with somebody else is allowed, but you still remember in the back of your head. So I really think that, like you said, it's good to have the support of argumentation and perhaps you know, streamlining work and so on. But I don't, I personally don't think in even that role plays is good for some areas, but completely outsourcing everything to AI is a mistake. And in the work that I do, uh one of the most satisfying parts is how actually there is data that can augment humans is not about micro-learning, it's about nano-learning in the flow of work. How do you actually make those little like Dualingo for business? This is probably the best way to summarize it, and how this really helps you to perform better because you try it, you come back to it, you listen to it, you play with it. So, in these areas, I think is good. We are giving AI too much credit, and I'm hoping that I'm not wrong on this one.

SPEAKER_02 28:31

I was talking to an executive this earlier this week, um, and he was talking about how within the organization, even at their senior leadership level, you know, you have people who are very afraid of what this means for jobs, who are hoping maybe it goes away, you know, kind of putting their head in the sand. Um, but at the same time, so you know, very strong fear narrative. But then the way he talked about the future was more about well, how do we think about redesigning the company? Like, how would we do things if we didn't think about our traditional silos and we think about process rebuilding from the ground up? And so there was there was that possibility there of, you know, we can build a new organization and do things better. And that doesn't have to necessarily equate to just job loss. But I think the reality is we're toggling back and forth between those states probably many times a day.

SPEAKER_01 29:26

There's such tremendous pressure, at least in my industry, to embrace AI. And obviously, all the what-ifs, what does that mean for my my career, for you know, the people that I work with and their futures and the future of work and the people around me like definitely do waffle between like the possibility and the um we talk about the word agency before and that's uniquely human. I think having knowing that we do have agency and how this all rolls out and how this how this shapes us or how we shape it versus it shaping us, I'm seeing more people embracing that side of things because they know it's it's going to be here and they want to be able to have a front row seat in how in deciding how it how it applies to their world and applies to the work and the people that they work with. And I'll have these existential moments too. What does this mean? Am I doing the right thing? What is my career going to be in a year or six months or whatever? And I keep coming back to, well, at least I'm exploring this stuff and understanding how it works and figuring out where it's good and where it's not. That's the best thing that people can do right now is really get understand it the more that people have that understanding and then can instead be more proactive and take the intentional about it versus, you know, having it happen to them is gonna help allow us to be able to have more control over where things end up and to be feel like we're part of that rather than it just happening to us.

SPEAKER_04 30:48

I'm thinking a lot about companies and organizations that exist to solve like a problem. I mean, every company started because they have a problem they're trying to solve, right? But then if you start being successful, your goal is to keep existing and make money. But I think the one the companies and organizations that are really still have hard problems are really using AI the best. I think about I'm obsessed right now with Lawrence Livermore creating fusion energy. And they used AI because to create like an ignition reaction, which would create clean energy for the world, right? And would change everything. They have to um direct it's like close to 200 lasers and mirrors. And before AI, a person couldn't do that. But with AI, they can they can coordinate all that and they understand how to focus it. And so what people assumed would take decades will probably now be here in 20 the 2030s. There was an example of a guy, I think, who just saved his dog's life by developing a cancer. If you want to be ambitious and if you want to really solve something that's really awful and hard, you can now. And that's where I see the hope and the progress.

SPEAKER_02 32:01

It's uniquely human to have a sense of purpose. What's the to have a sense of what problem are you trying to solve and not just be on autopilot? So I think that's one to really spend time thinking about our purpose and how we want to help people. Um, and then to be able to tell a story about that that inspires other people to come work on it with you. I think that's also uniquely human and just the way that we absorb ideas and make change. And so those two things together are what I want to hold on to.

SPEAKER_01 32:29

I would say empathy or user centricity, really remembering that at the end of the day that this world is populated by people. And regardless of what the technology is or how much technology there is, the people are the people at the end of the day, and they're the ones who are going to be the users or the people inner or the things that are interacting with the technology. And as you think about ways to make decisions around whether or not to use AI and how to use AI, what you know possibilities it creates, I think at the end of the day, you know, AI doesn't understand humans. And so making sure that as you're, you know, if you're as uh Deanna was talking about creating a new company or being an entrepreneur or thinking about how to motivate people's behavior in your organization and get them excited about something, you have to go back to what are the things that make us uniquely human and that we can connect back to and make all of this stuff be relevant to them. Thinking about like how to design things for people and how people work and think and do things. That's something that's really hard for AI to do. And I think it's something that will be really important no matter where we end up with all of this technology.

SPEAKER_00 33:34

It's about honesty and this idea of leading with truth in a world where reality is a commodity and deep fakes is like common in every single possible way, and that you know, whatever you say could be whatever you say, it doesn't really matter. The truth is not is not valuable anymore. So I think that what makes us human is to put our money where our mouth is and fulfilling that whole. I don't know how to say this more succinctly, but I think that leaders should keep this honesty. It's not actually intrinsically human or AI, because AI hallucinates more than we do. But I think that the ones that actually manage to do that will gravitate and will win because that is what's missing in every world, in the AI world and the human world.

SPEAKER_04 34:23

It's interesting because I think historically I've been asking myself this question of how do I stay human in this world of AI? But I realize actually the way to do that is to treat other people as humans. It's that simple. Just have compassion and empathy and trust for others, and then you become that.

SPEAKER_03 34:41

As AI accelerates, the real question is not what the technology can do, it is what leadership must become. Throughout this conversation, we explored the tension between machine capability and human responsibility and the qualities leaders must protect as AI becomes more powerful. Empathy, judgment, purpose, human agency. Thank you to Amanda, Darlene, Diana, and Michaela for such a thoughtful discussion. This is Lessons from the Field, where we explore how leaders are navigating real challenges inside organizations. If this conversation resonated, subscribe and share it with a leader who is thinking about the future of work. And if you'd like to continue the conversation, join our leadership circle for women, where we are thinking deeply about our lives and becoming all of ourselves.