AI & Leadership · 4 min
For founders implementing AI: we must become more human, not less
Investors ask about your AI strategy. Your team asks whether they still have a job. And you have to lead people through it.
If you are a founder or a leader in a scale-up right now, you know the pressure. There has to be an AI strategy, it should have been ready yesterday, and there is an implicit promise that everything gets faster and cheaper. Meanwhile there are people in your organisation working out what it means for them. They do not necessarily ask out loud.
The conventional reading
The usual conclusion is straightforward: automate what can be automated, and get more out of fewer. People become a cost you optimise down, and leadership becomes a question of rolling tools out fast enough.
I am not against the tools. I use them daily. But that reading misses what actually happens when the answers become free.
A different starting point
I deeply believe that as AI takes over more and more of what used to be human work, our chance to remain relevant lies in becoming even more human — more competent humans. That is our edge. So let us invest in the humanity.
It forces a question most companies have been able to postpone for decades: what is it that humans actually contribute? The answer is not faster data processing. It is emotions, which govern how we act. Curiosity, which we are born with. Judgement and responsibility. The ability to read a room. The need for connection, and the ability to create it. Craft, morality, imagination.
The machine scales steadily and exponentially, forgets nothing and has no bad conscience. The human is a pulsating creature, not a steady machine. That is not a weakness to be fixed. It is a different kind of capacity — and it has to be led differently.
What it means for your leadership
AI can write a draft strategy. It cannot carry the responsibility for it at four o'clock on a Thursday, when an employee asks whether her role still exists next year. It can propose a restructuring, but it cannot feel whether the trust in the room is holding.
That is where your job moves. Less about having the answers, more about being able to hold the fact that the organisation has to go through a change none of you have been through before. That requires you to be resourced enough to be present in it yourself.
Try this
Take your most recent AI decision and ask: what was the human context of it? Who was affected, what were they walking around thinking, and who did I actually ask? If you cannot answer, it is not a technology decision yet — it is a draft.
If you are sceptical, try it on a single initiative for a month. I would like to hear how it went.