Last week, we launched our new Business Leadership Essentials simulation, and something
interesting happened during the debriefings. Several new leaders openly admitted how much they love AI and how it's changing how they think about leadership. One simulation scenario challenged participants to decide how to use AI as managers, and the discussions were fascinating. The scenario was related to using AI for performance reviews.
At Advantexe, we're also using AI in ways that would have seemed like science fiction just a few years ago. We're building AI-powered business simulations, creating realistic role-playing experiences, and helping leaders develop new capabilities through technologies that continue to amaze me.
But those debriefings got me thinking. If AI can write an employee's performance review, set their goals, create a coaching plan, and even tell you how to resolve a conflict, what's left for the manager to do?
The answer, of course, is just about everything that matters. That's one of the most interesting leadership challenges of the AI revolution.
Welcome to the Age of the AI-Enabled Manager
Imagine you're a newly promoted manager with eight direct reports, three deadlines approaching, a budget that's already under pressure, and an employee who believes your promotion should have been theirs. Sound familiar?
Now imagine having an AI assistant available 24 hours a day to help you navigate these challenges. Need to create SMART goals? Done. Need a coaching plan for an underperforming employee? Done. Need to prepare for a difficult conversation? Done. Need to write eight performance reviews by Friday afternoon? Done, done, done, done, done, done, done, and done!
What a wonderful world! Except there's a small problem that I think we're overlooking in our enthusiasm to use AI to make everything faster, easier, and cheaper. Completing a leadership task and actually leading someone are not necessarily the same thing.
AI-Assisted Leadership Versus AI-Dependent Leadership
I've been thinking about two types of managers emerging in the age of AI. The first is the AI-assisted leader, who uses AI to prepare, explore alternatives, challenge assumptions, and think through difficult situations. Before giving constructive feedback, for example, this manager might use AI to role-play the conversation, anticipate possible reactions, and consider different approaches. Then they apply their own judgment and have the actual conversation. Terrific use of AI!
The second is the AI-dependent leader, who asks AI to write the feedback, copies it into an email, hits send, and checks the task off the list. No conversation, no questions, and no understanding of the employee's perspective. But the performance management system now has a completed feedback entry, so everything must be wonderful!
The difference between these managers isn't their ability to use technology. It's their understanding of leadership. AI-assisted leaders use technology to strengthen their judgment, while AI-dependent leaders use technology as a substitute for judgment. And those approaches can produce very different business results.
The Performance Review That Nobody Wrote
Let's take this a step further and imagine a manager asking AI to write a performance review for an employee named Sarah. The manager provides a few notes about her accomplishments, some performance metrics, and a couple of areas for improvement. Seconds later, AI produces a beautifully written review filled with impressive phrases like "demonstrates cross-functional collaboration" and "continues to develop strategic stakeholder engagement capabilities."
On the surface, this sounds wonderful. The manager saved a few hours, updated the performance management system, and Sarah received a beautifully written review filled with impressive corporate language.
Unfortunately, there's a little more to the story. For months, Sarah has struggled with a colleague who routinely misses deadlines, and her manager hasn't done anything about it. She's frustrated, disengaged, and starting to look for another job. None of that made it into the review because the manager never took the time to understand what was actually happening.
So now Sarah is reading this wonderful AI-generated document, filled with glowing observations about her "strategic stakeholder engagement capabilities," and thinking to herself, "Does this person even know who I am?" Meanwhile, her manager feels pretty good about the productivity gains from AI. What could possibly go wrong?
The problem isn't that AI wrote the review. The problem is that the manager confused writing about performance with managing performance. That's a leadership problem, not a technology problem.
The Hidden Business Acumen of AI-Enabled Leadership
Here's where this gets particularly interesting to me. Having spent much of my career helping leaders develop business acumen, I naturally look at these situations through an economic lens. AI has the potential to create enormous efficiencies in management, but I think we need to be a little more thoughtful about how we measure those efficiencies.
Consider a manager who spends five hours preparing performance reviews, coaching plans, and team goals. If AI reduces that work to two hours, the manager has theoretically recovered three hours of productive capacity. Multiply that across 100 managers, and you've recovered 300 hours. That's a significant opportunity, but here's my business acumen question: What happens to those 300 hours?
If managers use that time to coach employees, improve customer relationships, solve operational problems, and develop their teams, the business can create meaningful value. If those hours disappear into more meetings, unnecessary reports, or taking care of personal stuff while "on the clock," the return on the AI investment may be disappointing.
And what happens if AI-generated communications damage trust, create confusion, or contribute to employee turnover? The business could actually be worse off, despite all the wonderful productivity reports showing how much time everyone saved.
To me, the business acumen lesson is pretty straightforward. The value of AI isn't determined solely by how much time it saves. It's determined by what people do with the time they get back. That's a very different way of measuring AI productivity, and one I think more organizations should be considering.
AI Can Help You Prepare for a Difficult Conversation. But You Still Have to Have It.
One of the things that excites me most about AI is its potential to help people practice. Think about a new manager preparing to tell an employee their performance isn't meeting expectations. They're nervous, they don't want to damage the relationship, but they know something needs to change.
Traditionally, they might read an article, attend a workshop, or ask their boss for advice. All helpful, but what if they could practice the conversation with an AI-powered character who responds realistically? What if the employee gets defensive, disagrees with the feedback, or reveals something unexpected? What if the manager handles the conversation poorly and gets to try again?
Now we're getting somewhere!
This is exactly the kind of learning experience we're developing through Advantexe's AI-powered simulations and role-playing tools. Our new Business Leadership Essentials simulation puts emerging leaders into realistic situations involving goal setting, coaching, feedback, conflict resolution, and AI-enabled decision-making. They make choices, experience consequences, and discover what works and what doesn't.
And with AI-powered role-playing, they can rehearse challenging conversations before having them with real employees. Instead of using AI to write a difficult feedback email and avoid the conversation, the manager uses AI to build the confidence and skills to have a better conversation.
We're using artificial intelligence to develop human intelligence. I think that's a pretty exciting opportunity.
The Leadership Skills AI Makes More Important
Here's the irony of all this. The more powerful AI becomes, the more important some of the most basic leadership skills become. AI can help develop goals, but the manager still needs to understand the business priorities. AI can suggest coaching strategies, but the manager still needs to listen and understand the employee.
AI can recommend approaches to resolving conflict, but the manager still has to bring people together and work through their differences. And AI can help prepare a performance review, but the manager still has to understand the employee's performance and take responsibility for the feedback.
In other words, AI can make leadership more efficient, but efficiency isn't the same as effectiveness. I think that's a distinction we're going to hear a lot more about as organizations continue investing billions of dollars in AI technologies. Producing more leadership documents, faster, isn't necessarily the same as producing better leaders.
The Future of Leadership Is Human, With a Little Help From AI
I started this blog by sharing how excited our simulation participants were about AI, and I share their enthusiasm. I believe AI will fundamentally change how we develop leaders, make decisions, and operate businesses. But I don't think the greatest opportunity is to automate leadership. It's to make leaders better.
That's why I'm so excited about integrating AI into our Business Leadership Essentials learning journey. We're giving new and early-career managers opportunities to practice, experiment, make mistakes, and build confidence before facing difficult situations in the real world. We're also helping them understand when AI can make them better and when it's time to set it aside and simply lead.
Because at the end of the day, your employees don't need a manager who can generate the world's most beautifully written performance review. They need a manager who understands them, helps them improve, holds them accountable, and gives them a reason to bring their best to work.
AI can help with that, but you still have to do the leading.
The future of leadership isn't AI replacing managers. It's managers who know how to use AI becoming better leaders.
