AI: The Work It Cannot Do
Last week I sat in a room with a group of business owners — people who are carrying real weight, building real companies, managing real human beings — and I asked them a simple question: Write down your top three most valuable uses of AI. Then write one or two questions you have about using AI for leadership development.
The first list came fast. They were good at this. Drafting emails. Analyzing data. Summarizing reports. Preparing for difficult conversations. The list was real and it was honest — these are people actually using the tools, not just talking about them.
The second list was slower. Quieter. And almost everyone wrote some version of the same question: How can AI help me develop my people? How do I start?
That question is the whole conversation.
Every business owner I know is running hard. The loneliness at the top is real. The feeling of being the bottleneck — of holding your team’s vision in your head while they execute something slightly different — is real. The Groundhog Day of the same issues, the same conversations, the same unresolved tensions resurfacing every quarter — that is real too. And somewhere in the middle of all of that, a tool arrived that promised to help. An extraordinarily capable tool, available at two in the morning, infinitely patient, never having a bad day.
Of course you asked whether it could solve your leadership problems. That instinct makes complete sense. It is the same resourcefulness that built your business.
There is no doubt that AI is genuinely good at an enormous range of business tasks — drafting, research, scenario modeling, lead scoring, financial reporting, session preparation, meeting transcription, learning path creation. It can prepare your people for hard conversations. It can summarize the patterns across your last twelve leadership sessions. It can draft a performance review, flag anomalies in your numbers, and stress-test your strategic assumptions before you walk into the boardroom. These are real capabilities, not hype. Sixty-three percent of the top one hundred AI use cases identified this year are explicitly work-related.¹
Use it. Use it well. And then ask the harder question hiding underneath: not Can AI develop my people? but What does it actually take to develop a person?
The Story We've Been Telling Ourselves
The leadership development industry was built on a premise that has never been examined as carefully as it deserves: that development is primarily an information challenge.
If we give people the right frameworks, they will lead better. If we expose them to the right content, they will grow. If we give them a personalized learning path, the path will transform them. And so leaders accumulate knowledge — more books, more podcasts, more seminars, more tools — while something essential continues to go unaddressed.
I think of a leader I met with — smart, motivated, charismatic, and committed to his team. He had read more leadership books than anyone on his staff. He could cite Lencioni, Covey, and Collins from memory. He had shelves of highlighted books and notebooks and journals.
And his team was quietly unraveling.
Not because he lacked information. Because he didn’t know how to be present with people. He didn’t know how to make someone feel seen. He had never learned — really learned, in the way that changes behavior — how to create the conditions where people feel safe enough to bring their whole selves to work.
No course had taught him that. No AI tool was going to.
Joy Leads to Transformation
As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another. — Proverbs 27:17
This is not a metaphor about information exchange. It is a description of what happens between people.
Roy Baumeister and Mark Leary published their landmark study in 1995 concluding that human beings have a fundamental need to belong — that without consistent, caring relationships, we deteriorate emotionally, cognitively, and physically.² They were confirming what Scripture declared millennia ago: God did not design us to be informed into transformation. He designed us to be formed in relationship.
The neuroscience has caught up. Allan Schore’s research on the developing brain established that human brains grow and change not through the accumulation of content, but through relational experience — specifically, through the kind of attunement and co-regulation that only happens between people.³ Not every interaction changes a brain. It is specifically the exchange of genuine warmth — the felt sense that another person’s presence is safe, engaged, and welcoming — that opens the nervous system. When that quality is absent, the brain stays guarded, and development stalls.
But here is what matters most for leadership development: the relational experience that produces transformation has a specific quality. Jim Wilder and Marcus Warner define joy as the experience of being with someone who is genuinely glad you are there — and they make the case that joy is not a nice-to-have in human development. It is the neurological prerequisite.⁴
Belonging isn’t proximity. It isn’t a clean set of checkboxes on a DEI form. Belonging is the experience of joy with another person — the felt sense that someone is genuinely glad you are here. Joy is not the reward for belonging. Joy is what creates it.
Information informs. Belonging transforms.
Jesus Understood This Before the Neuroscientists Did
Jesus did not build a curriculum. He chose twelve men and said, Come, follow Me.
For three years, they ate together, traveled together, argued together, and grieved together. They watched Him respond to the sick, the powerful, and the outcast. They saw how He handled betrayal, pressure, and sorrow. They experienced what it felt like to be known and chosen by Someone who was genuinely glad they were there.
At the Last Supper, He got up from the table and washed their feet — an act so far outside the expected social order that Peter couldn’t receive it. And then He said this: I no longer call you servants, because a servant does not know his master’s business. Instead, I have called you friends. — John 15:15
Friends. Not students. Not followers. Not employees.
The word makes the difference. It describes a quality of relationship in which the other person is not a means to an end, not a problem to manage, not a resource to deploy — but someone whose presence you enjoy and genuinely matters to you.
That is the relational condition under which people actually change. It is also the condition you can choose to create.
What This Means for How You Lead
Think about a moment when you grew as a leader — a real moment, not a course you completed.
Chances are, there was a person in it. Someone who believed in you before you believed in yourself. Someone who asked you a question that you’re still answering. Someone who stayed present with you in a hard moment long enough for something to shift.
That is what we are asking our leaders to create — not for their own development, but for the people on their teams.
It doesn’t require more time. It requires a different kind of attention.
The teams that develop the fastest are not the teams with the best content libraries. They are the teams where people feel known. Where leaders make eye contact before launching into the agenda. Where someone notices when a person seems off and asks a real question. Where the experience of the meeting itself communicates: you matter here.
That experience doesn’t happen at scale. It happens one conversation at a time.
Here is one practice to start: before your next team meeting, take sixty seconds and ask yourself one question — Who on this team most needs to know I’m glad they’re here? Then tell them. Not in a meeting. Not as an agenda item. In a hallway, face-to-face. A thirty-second conversation before the call begins.
It will not feel like leadership development. It will feel too small.
Do it anyway.
The Work Only You Can Do
I am not arguing against AI. I use it. I find it genuinely useful – sometimes amazingly so. The leaders I work with use it, and many of them are better resourced because of it.
I am arguing for clarity about what it can and cannot do.
The capabilities I described earlier are real. Used well, they create more margin for what only humans can do.
And that is a category of leadership work that no tool can touch. It cannot read the room when the energy shifts mid-meeting. It cannot hear what isn’t said. It cannot tell the difference between consensus and compliance — and that difference determines whether a decision actually holds. It cannot sit with someone in their fear, de-escalate before something blows up, or know when to stop the agenda because something more important just surfaced. It cannot hold a founder to their own values when those values become inconvenient. It cannot repair trust when it breaks.
AI can talk about emotional safety. It cannot create it.
The question isn’t what content your team needs.
The question is whether they belong.
Answer that question first. Then let the tools help.
¹ Marc Zao-Sanders, “How AI Is Changing Learning and Development,” Harvard Business Review, 2026.
² Roy F. Baumeister and Mark R. Leary, “The Need to Belong: Desire for Interpersonal Attachments as a Fundamental Human Motivation,” Psychological Bulletin 117, no. 3 (1995): 497.
³ Allan N. Schore, “The Experience-Dependent Maturation of a Regulatory System in the Orbital Prefrontal Cortex and the Origin of Developmental Psychopathology,” Development and Psychopathology 8 (1996): 60.
⁴ Jim Wilder and Marcus Warner, Rare Leadership in the Workplace (Moody Publishers, 2016), 16.
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