In the last post, I explored a question that is easy to miss as organizations adopt AI/SI:
What happens when the work we automate was also the work that helped people learn?
There is no simple answer.
Some work should disappear. Some tasks consume time without creating much value for the person doing them or the organization receiving them. But other work carries something beneath the surface. It teaches people how to notice, how to question, how to make a decision when the information is incomplete.
The challenge is learning to tell the difference between busy work and valuable work.
Three Kinds of Work
As leaders rethink roles, it may help to see work in three broad categories.
The first is work AI/SI can perform completely.
These may be repetitive tasks where automation genuinely gives people more time for meaningful contribution. Letting go of this work can create welcome space.
The second is work AI/SI can support, while a person retains responsibility for judgment.
Automation might organize the information, identify patterns, or offer possible interpretations. The person still has to test the output, understand the context, and decide what to do.
This work can become more developmental, not less, if people are taught to examine rather than simply accept what the technology produces.
The third is work that may need to remain deliberately human.
Not because the ghost in the machine is incapable of contributing, but because the experience itself helps someone grow: a challenging conversation; a stakeholder interview; the first draft of an important recommendation; a review of the resumes and applications that made it past the digital gatekeeper.
Couple any of these with the opportunity to sit beside an experienced leader and hear why one possibility was chosen over another, and these experiences develop the judgment that future leaders will need.
Delegation Is Also Development
When someone enters a new leadership role, there is often pressure to improve efficiency quickly.
The leader inherits deadlines, expectations, and a team whose capabilities may not yet be fully visible. AI/SI can offer immediate ways to move faster, but a new leader is also shaping how the team will learn.
Every decision about who attends a meeting, prepares a recommendation, speaks with a stakeholder, or evaluates a computer-generated answer becomes part of the team’s development system.
Delegation is not only about distributing the work. It is also about distributing the opportunities to grow.
That does not mean giving people responsibilities without support. Productive development usually includes some combination of challenge, observation, feedback, reflection, and another opportunity to try.
Automation can participate in that process. It can help someone explore alternatives, prepare for a conversation, or identify gaps in their reasoning. What it cannot do on its own is decide which experiences a person needs in order to become ready for what comes next.
That remains a leadership responsibility.
Preserving the Path to Leadership
The organizations that navigate this well may not be the ones that automate the most. They may be the ones that understand what their work has been teaching people and replace those lessons intentionally when the work changes.
That begins with a quieter kind of attention and a few important questions:
Which assignments help people develop judgment?
Where do employees learn the unwritten context behind important decisions?
Who is being invited into conversations that stretch their perspective?
Where might efficiency be removing the experiences that prepared someone else to lead?
AI/SI will continue to change what people do. The deeper leadership question is whether we will remain thoughtful about who they are becoming while they do it.
If you are stepping into a new leadership role or reconsidering how your team develops people as work changes, coaching can provide the space to examine those decisions more closely.
If you would like to explore what that support could look like, I invite you to contact me for a conversation.
