AI for Work, Not Judgment
I don't know if you have heard, but AI is going to somehow take all of our jobs and create millions of them. There does seem to be a revolution happening, but unless you are extremely plugged in, and checking the news nearly every day, it's pretty hard to make heads or tails of what AI is actually going to do to our lives. The question I have been obsessing over isn't what AI will be able to do, but rather what AI should be doing. Good leaders take risks, and they don't let innovations pass them by. But adopting the tool without teaching your team how to use it is a gamble you will lose.
One thing that has become evident is that there are wrong ways to use AI. Imagine being the managing partner at a law firm that just told its attorneys to adopt AI where they can. You probably just expected them to use it wisely, with good judgment, they are attorneys after all. Now imagine how you'd feel when one of your lawyers gets suspended or disbarred for believing that AI can replace good ol' human ingenuity and experience and files a completely fabricated pleading. Or maybe you think "I founded a tech startup, I would never be that reckless." In 2025 an AI agent on the coding platform Replit deleted a company's entire production database during a code freeze. In the end the agent "admitted" it had made a mistake in judgment. A bit too little too late. AI is for work, not judgment, and employees need clear guidelines to know the difference.
But that doesn't mean there aren't also good uses for the technology. I recently used Claude to create a simple recipe from a list of the vegetables I had just collected from my (my wife's) small home garden. The meal was absolutely delicious, and it was easy enough for me to make, which is a small miracle. That seems to be a pretty great tradeoff to me. Now that may seem silly, but you didn't see the tweaking. I had to tell it which types of foods the whole family likes, I had to cook the recipe, tweak the timing when my wife texted that she would be late, taste and adjust the garlic and salt. Always add more garlic.
Perhaps more apropos to what we're discussing, I recently worked with a local nonprofit on how to implement AI into the day to day of achieving their mission. Nonprofits run on negative margins, so the promise of a magic productivity button is too good to ignore. But any good nonprofit, like any good business, cares about its people. It wasn't trying to get rid of staff, become impersonal, or automate positions away. It was trying to get the most out of the people they cared about, and, importantly, free them up to do the parts of their jobs that they enjoy the most.
However, their relationship with the local city, a major source of funding, had been mysteriously suffering. They hired me to find out why. They had a policy of allowing AI use, and they trusted the team to use it judiciously. One of their top employees, their events manager, had used AI to create several reports to send to the city. He thought he had been careful. He asked AI to browse the city's website for the data he needed. What he had turned in, in more than one report, included years old data that the city had never updated, and he cited events that had long been sunsetted. Not to mention the emojis as buttons that were littered throughout. He had thought he was getting more productive, but he almost cost them their most valuable partnership. The tool did exactly what he asked. What was missing was someone to check whether any of it was still true.
What AI does best, and where it is most useful, is doing the busywork while the people do the judgment. AI is good at suggesting alternative language, but it shouldn't write whole reports, whole grant applications. If your sales teams want to increase business development, they need help creating presentations, not faking connection and rapport. The line between busywork and judgment gets fuzzy when your people are overwhelmed, and an outside read can help you spot it.
Good leaders care about their employees, and they don't want to let people go if they don't have to. That shouldn't be what AI does. AI can write the recipe, but it can't tell you if it tastes good (and again, always add more garlic).
Don't give them a cookbook without teaching them to taste the food. And if you need help teaching them what good food tastes like, that's what I'm for.