With the rise of artificial intelligence, I’ve recently noticed a new trend that I find both interesting and a bit worrying. Some leaders ask AI for ready-made solutions to quite complex situations – ideally in a minute and a half – and then introduce these solutions just as quickly, often in an AI-written email. They skip the work with people and “solve” everything from behind their desks, looking extremely efficient on the surface.
Don’t get me wrong – AI is a great tool. I use it too. It turns my messy Hungarian notes into clear English or German presentations, helps me organize ideas and translate texts. But in all these cases, the thinking still comes from me. The real content is based on what I personally experienced: the people in the room, the culture, the dynamics of cooperation. If I skip all that and simply ask AI in three sentences to create an organizational development plan, I’ll get something professionally correct – a textbook solution for an abstract organization. But there’s no guarantee it will actually fit the real one I’m working with.
Because AI simply can’t know all the subtle details that shape a company. Those small signals, emotions, and unspoken rules that are hard to describe but easy to feel. And these tiny nuances decide how a task can be solved: how fast, with what approach, and how much professional, diplomatic, mentoring, coaching – or sometimes emotional – support is needed.
You move differently with an authoritarian leader than with a more relaxed one. You support an insecure colleague differently than a fresh graduate. And an organization can handle different things in times of growth than in times of decline. AI can’t calculate these differences. Even as humans, paying close attention, it takes time to understand what will really work, and often our decisions are based on intuition.
For me, this is the key point. AI is an excellent support tool. It can help write a well-structured job description that I can refine and adapt to the company’s language, saving time. But it won’t sit down with the employee to discuss it in detail.
It can create a new organizational chart, but it won’t work with teams to clarify responsibilities, and it won’t handle the emotions that always come with change – disappointment, fear, resistance.
Whenever the human factor is central, and success depends on real cooperation and interaction between people, AI can only offer limited help. It can speed things up, support us, and organize information – but it won’t do the human work for us.
