A leader I’ll call Dana was short on time before year-end reviews. She asked an AI tool to draft a performance summary for one of her managers. It came back polished, balanced, and well organized.
She was about to send it when she stopped on one line: “strong collaboration across teams.” She couldn’t think of a single moment that sentence was based on. The summary was fine. It just wasn’t hers. She hadn’t remembered his year. The tool had produced a year that sounded believable.
That’s the question I want to sit with here. Not whether leaders should use AI. Whether we’re quietly handing over parts of leading that were never meant to be handed over.
Using AI and Depending on AI Are Not the Same Thing
When you use it well, you stay in charge of the thinking. The tool helps you move faster or see more.
When you depend on it, the tool does the thinking and you approve.
The tool hasn’t changed between those two. What changed is who is doing the judging.
Three Things a Tool Can’t Carry For You
- Experience You know the history. The last reorganization. What this team has already absorbed. Why the quiet person on the call is quiet. That context lives in you and your people, not in the prompt.
- Empathy A tool can describe how someone might feel. It can’t sit across from them and notice that “I’m fine” isn’t true.
- Accountability When a decision lands well or badly, someone answers for it. Not the tool. You. That’s the job, and it can’t be handed off.
Signs You May Be Leaning Too Hard
- You accept the first answer more often than you used to.
- You can’t explain the reasoning in your own words.
- You’ve stopped asking your team what they think.
- You feel relief when the answer comes back, more than conviction.
- You reach for it first on the conversations you’ve been avoiding.
None of these make you a bad leader. They’re signals worth noticing, the way you’d notice you’ve stopped taking the stairs.
One Simple Check
Before you act on anything AI helped with, ask yourself:
Could I explain this decision, in my own words, to the person it affects, without looking at the screen?
If yes, you’re probably using it well. If not, go back and do the thinking that’s missing.
Where It Can Help
I use AI most days. It helps me see what I might be missing, organize my thoughts, and practice a conversation before I have it. I wrote about a habit I teach for this on LinkedIn, Think, Test, Decide. Form your own view first. Test it, with a tool or with people you trust. Then decide with what only you know. If you’re wary of using it for decisions at all, that’s a reasonable place to be. The same habit works without a tool.
Questions To Sit With
- Where have I accepted an answer lately because it was easy?
- Which decisions on my plate need my experience, my empathy, or my name on them?
- What would my team say if I asked how I’m using it?
AI will keep getting better at producing answers. Your value as a leader has never been in having the answers. It’s in the judgment you bring to them, and the care you bring to the people they affect.