Are You Feeling Enthusiastic About AI? Neither Am I.

Hot take: CEOs and boards are the only ones who truly love AI. And even then, what they love is the promise of it. The version where computers fully replace human labor and the org chart gets cut in half. Clean, efficient, cheap. No more messy humans with opinions and salary requirements.

The rest of us are somewhere on a spectrum between cautiously optimistic and quietly terrified. And we're all pretending otherwise in meetings.

Here's the problem. While we're waiting for the AI utopia to arrive, every job interview, every budget conversation, and every strategic planning session is already tangled up in the hype. Executives are dropping essay-length ChatGPT outputs into Slack like they're deliverables. Boards are asking why headcount can't be reduced if AI can "do the same thing." The gap between what AI actually does well and what leadership thinks it does is wide, and someone has to bridge it.

That someone is you.

Good leaders hire people smarter than them in specific areas and then actually let those people set the strategy. The keyword is "let." Too many executives are skipping the human expertise step entirely and going straight to the chatbot. The AI doesn't have context. It doesn't have judgment. It doesn't understand your customers, your competitive position, or why that one campaign failed two years ago in a way that still matters today.

Your strategy is better. Your instincts, built from real experience in your field, will outperform a prompt every time on anything that actually requires thinking.

Use AI where it earns its place. First drafts. Tedious research. Summarizing things you don't have time to read. Filling gaps where your expertise runs thin. That's genuinely useful. But the thinking? The judgment calls? The creative leaps that move a business forward? Those still belong to people.

AI isn't going anywhere. Neither is the value of people who know what they're doing. The job right now is making sure the people above you understand the difference.