What happens when the thing that used to make you valuable as a leader, the managing, is exactly what AI is best at? In this conversation, Andrea Levinson sits down with Jemi Crookes, AI transformation strategist and Partner, Business Advisory at Hoffmann Reed, to explore what's actually left of leadership once giving instructions, checking every step and moving information from one place to another get handed to a tireless, tool-agnostic machine. Jemi shares the story of quietly outsourcing her own busywork three years ago, and the outstanding year at work that followed, plus her framework for the different personas every AI rollout needs, why "waiting until it's ready" is a trap, and why the nervous system, not just the mindset, is where a lot of this change is actually landing. There are real implications here for the future of work, future of leadership and leadership development.

Five Things That Stayed With Me

1. Managing vs leading — a real distinction

AI isn't replacing managers, it's replacing the managing: giving instruction, deploying process, checking every step. What's left is the harder, more human work — inspiring people, applying judgement, making calls from years of experience, and bringing people into the process rather than just presenting them with the output.

2. Design the process, don't babysit the task

Jemi's approach isn't to use AI on everything, all day. It's to find the one thing you do over and over, build a repeatable process around it, fix the kinks once, and then let it run in the background — instead of sitting there watching the little sparkle and burning the same mental energy you were trying to save.

3. The flywheel of personas

Rather than a spectrum from "leading edge" to "laggards," Jemi frames AI adoption as a flywheel: visionaries who chase the shiny new thing and create both value and risk, guardians who slow things down but make the rollout safer, people-people who steward how the culture is feeling, and operators who love designing the process. Good leadership means knowing which one you naturally are — and deliberately bringing in the others.

4. The nervous system cost of "keeping up"

This isn't only a mindset shift. The pace of change in AI can genuinely register as unsafe to a nervous system that wasn't built for it — and naming that as real, rather than a personal failing, matters. Jemi's antidote isn't speed. It's getting on the path, focusing on the next two or three steps, and staying curious rather than trying to see the whole road.

5. Dependency is about outsourced judgement, not outsourced typing

Using AI to search or draft isn't the concerning dependency. The risk is outsourcing the choice of what to apply it to. It's also skipping the discomfort of thinking, debating and sitting with uncertainty, which is what actually produces a report, or a roadmap, worth having.

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Quotes Worth Holding

"AI isn't replacing managers. It's replacing the managing." - Jemi Crookes

"Everyone feels behind. Everyone feels like this moment is uniquely challenging." - Jemi Crookes

"If it feels hard, it's because it is hard." - Jemi Crookes

"AI in many ways is the latest shiny object to challenge our ability to be focused, hold the destination, and be loose about the journey." - Andrea Levinson

"We are striving to create an experience where we love our work, but it also loves us back." - Andrea Levinson

What We Expored

0:00 Introduction: leadership, AI and what's left when the managing is automated

1:22 Jemi's edge: quietly outsourcing the busywork with ChatGPT in a high-stakes corporate role

8:07 Managing vs leading: what AI actually replaces

15:38 The unknowing: why waiting for AI to be "ready" is a trap, and the flywheel of adoption personas

26:24 Strategy over shiny objects: the architecture AI needs to sit inside

33:03 AI dependency and the human capabilities worth protecting

44:18 Sitting in discomfort, and one practical starting point for anyone feeling behind

About Jemi Crookes

Jemi Crookes is an AI transformation strategist and Partner, Business Advisory at Hoffmann Reed, consulting globally from Australia on AI fluency, strategy and enablement. Before moving into this work, she led corporate strategy for a large executive search and advisory practice, responsible for 145 consultants across 16 countries. After quietly using AI to reclaim hours of her own time, and having an outstanding year at work as a result, she left to start her own consultancy, helping leaders and organisations navigate AI-driven change with a focus on the human and psychological side of adoption, not just the tools.

If this conversation resonated, explore more insights and resources at andrealevinson.com.au

Full Transcript

Lightly edited for readability. The full timestamped version is available on YouTube.

ANDREA: Hello and welcome everybody to this latest Leadership at the Edge conversation, and one that I know is so topical. We're talking about leadership and AI, one of the things that crops up in pretty much every conversation I'm having at the moment. We're joined by the amazing Jemi Crookes, who is doing so much work in this space, AI strategy, transformation, what it means for leaders, what it means for work. So we're going to explore so much of that today. Jemi, welcome to the conversation.

JEMI: Hello. Thanks for having me.

ANDREA: You're so welcome. I've got a stack of questions that people have been feeding me on the side. For those of you listening live, please drop into chat if there's something you really want to walk away from this conversation with, as we're exploring what leadership looks like when the managing, the cognitive load, the administrative load of managing, is taken care of by AI. Jemi, let's start where I normally start, a personal share. If you reflect on your leadership journey, when have you felt up against the edge of it? What did that look like, and what did you do about it?

JEMI: Yeah, it's such a good question, because that really was the beginning of my journey with AI myself. It was 2022, 2023, I worked a very senior corporate role. I led corporate strategy for a big executive search and advisory practice, 145 consultants across 16 countries, every time zone you can imagine. I was responsible for a lot. I had a three-going-on-four-year-old at that point, and a very busy partner, and no time in the day. I was working crazy hours, as soon as I left my desk at home it was straight to the kitchen, straight to an activity, straight to a birthday party.

JEMI: There was so much going on, and this thing called ChatGPT dropped on all of us. I just thought, what do I have to lose? I had nothing to lose and everything to gain in finding a solution for outsourcing some of that in-between stuff. There was a lot of repetitive work, translating from one format into another, a lot of searching through existing materials, and I just started giving it a go. That started saving me hours and hours. So much so that I didn't tell anybody I was doing it. I was just saving hours and giving them back to myself, thinking, I hope this stuff is good that I'm creating, I hope this is legal, what I'm doing, that voice in your head asking, is this cheating because I'm not typing it all out myself. But it kept saving me hours and hours of time.

JEMI: That was three years ago, and it really changed my perspective on the technology. With all that extra time, I started thinking about how I could do something different with it. Once I got myself back and was able to lead better, I had an outstanding year at work, people were like, "How do you have so many arms and legs? How are you getting so much done?" It was this magic secret AI thing I was doing. It really brought me back to myself, and then I left and started my own consultancy around AI and what that means for leaders.

ANDREA: What I love in what you're sharing is what you did with the time you got back. If I think about what I'm hearing from a lot of leaders in organisations, there is so much busy, so much to do, so much overwhelm, that the intentionality to really use that time you get back in a positive way isn't necessarily there, or it requires too much thinking from brains that are already overburdened. How did you actually make that happen? Are you seeing the same thing in others, and how do they make it happen for themselves?

JEMI: Yeah. I think because I've had an operational background, I thought about it more in terms of processes than individual tasks. There's a concept going around now called AI brain fry, our neuroscience friends know way more about that than I would, but we're using AI and then sitting and watching it do the thing, rather than letting it work in the background. So we're still thinking about the process that's happening, which means we're still burning that same energy rather than outsourcing it.

JEMI: Thinking about a process, you take the one thing you do over and over again, week after week, day after day, that's moving one piece of information from here to there. You take that amount of time and create a process around it. You train the AI to do it once, fix all the kinks and the things it doesn't do well, and then you can sit and let it do that repeatedly. Then you add another one, find a new opportunity and add that in. A lot of us like to think about using it on everything, all day.

JEMI: I actually encourage people to slow down and think about your actual processes, what you're spending the most time on over an extended period. It's a long-term game. You put something in place that you don't have to babysit, that you don't have to cognitively offload watching it work or making sure it worked properly. You build it that way, and then you have the confidence to just check the output, knowing the process was correct. Even in my business now, advising clients, I set my research running, and I have a really tested process for conducting research that I'm confident is going to be accurate, with the right sources and attributions. While it does that research, which takes about fifteen or twenty minutes, I go take a walk rather than spending the hours it would take me. I get a little bit of my humanity back in my day, because I'm confident in the output it's going to generate.

ANDREA: So you're giving it discrete tasks, one at a time. You're clear on what that process looks like. You've got systems in place to check, a human always checks or approves whatever comes out the other side. I love this AI brain fry language. I don't love the fact that it's happening, but I can relate. It does feel like, how long is this going to take, I'm going to sit there and watch the little sparkle, the little dazzle, rather than going, okay, that's happening, I get to go and do this other thing. So maybe that brings us to the question of what's the difference between managing and leading, this feels related. How would you define those?

JEMI: Yeah. In the community and space I work in, it's all about AI not replacing managers, it's replacing the managing. What we've defined managing as is giving instruction, deploying processes, then checking up on every step of that, creating materials. We've created a lot of "doing" in the modern workforce, in a corporate office setting, or even a small business setting, it's computer work, work that we created for the sake of using computers, and now we have these amazing little bots that live in the computer that can take that doing back. So the definition of leadership really is inspiring people, thinking critically, applying judgment, making really tough decisions from your gut, your expertise, your years of experience, from things you've read, conversations you've had.

JEMI: It's not just about sourcing the information and presenting it, it's the next step you take with that information, and how you bring people into that process, your clients, your team. It's what you do, how you act, what you say, that inspires them to want to be part of your business, part of your mission, on any project or initiative you're leading. AI gives us the time back, when it's done well and governed well, to actually get to the leadership, because we're so busy in the managing and the doing that the end bit, the most important bit, we don't always have time for.

JEMI: That really falls down, we're so busy running around that the actual conversation at the end that brings it all together becomes "I'll just send an email," when actually the meeting is what we should be having. That's the part where we connect with other human beings, and that's what makes us unique, we bring people into the process, we get to be creative and collaborative. That's being a human leader. Whereas all the other doing and generating and moving of pieces from here to there can just happen in the background.

ANDREA: Yes. And I hear every day from leaders, I don't have the time to go and have that coaching conversation, or we really need to come together as a team and tussle with this idea and figure out a new way, but we've got these reports we need to create or generate. There are these things that need to be done, for whatever reason. Maybe they don't need to be done, that might be a provocation to play with. But if they do, maybe there's a tool that can ease some of that. Rather than sitting there watching the AI execute, that gives us the time to come and relate and connect.

ANDREA: Not everybody finds that leading work easy, though. I think particularly for technical leaders who've perhaps come to leadership because they're the best at something, or because they're really good at management, I can anticipate that the idea of AI taking care of the management, and now actually needing to go and have the leadership, the confronting conversation, exploring the conflict or the values misalignment, is perhaps something that doesn't feel comfortable. Is that aligned with what you're seeing?

JEMI: Yeah, I think so. A lot of technical leaders right now are grappling with the idea that everybody, in some sense, now has to be somewhat technical, has to think technically. So what I try to do is empower CIOs, CTOs and heads of tech departments and their teams to actually think about the processes that have worked in tech for so long, driving agile change processes, new product releases and launches, how those were planned, designed, thought about and executed. It's an opportunity to teach the rest of the business how to follow similar processes where they haven't had to before.

JEMI: Rather than thinking about leading as having to stand in front of a room, play powerful, be big and strong, have everyone listen to you, it's more about teaching, supporting, giving people structure to work in. People work well within structure. So helping them understand what a new structure looks like, and what their place in it is. Tech leaders have been doing that for decades, that's how tech innovation cycles have happened. It's just bringing that to everybody else now, getting them on board. I hear it all the time from the tech side, why don't people just get it, we gave them the tool, why can't they just use it, implement it, start using it in their workflow. But people haven't been developed in the way tech leaders and tech teams have, in the way they've thought about systems and used systems to design outcomes. Being part of the teaching, part of inspiring what's possible, makes the leading a little less confronting.

ANDREA: And listening to you, the word that comes to mind for me is clarity. How much clarity can we create for people around the what, the why, the how, and what leading through that looks like. Perhaps leveraging AI looks clearer when you've been in the IT and ICT space. I see a lot of teams who have access to Copilot or whatever it is, but without really clear invitations or structures or processes to help them discern where to use it and where not to, which either slows things down, or we see this divergence between people who are really early adopters and people who are just kind of waiting.

JEMI: A lot of waiting. Yeah, I see people waiting. A lot of people will tell me, well, I just want to wait until it's really good, I want to wait till it's perfect and ready for me to use. I think there's a misunderstanding about this transformation era we're really going through. We don't know what the end goal of this technology is, we don't have a defined end point. Nobody does. That's part of the unknowing, a big part of the challenge. There's a lot of unknown, and there's a lot of waiting, because every other piece of tech we've gotten has been: you deploy the software, it's on the system, I log in, I learn how to use it, and over time I get better at what buttons to click. It's sort of a single functionality. Whereas this is so much bigger, it can do so much, and now it does things we can't even see it doing, which is terrifying. And it should be, it's doing things back there that I don't get and don't understand. Really helping provide the systems and the structure for people to become part of that process is the most critical thing leaders can do right now, to drive this safely and effectively. I always talk about there being different personas in this process.

JEMI: If you ask my tech friends, they'll tell you there's the leading edge and then there's the laggards. I don't think about it that way at all, I don't think about it as a curve, or even a spectrum. I think about it as a circle, a flywheel, with different personas around it. Of course you have your real visionaries, like myself, your shiny-object people, who go find the newest, shiniest object and test all the new tools. They create an enormous amount of value in any organisation, leading the way and the path we should follow. But we also create a lot of risk, because we're probably the first ones to go and try a new tool that hasn't been allowed by the higher authority on things yet.

JEMI: On the other side, you have what I call your guardians, the stewards of risk and safety, of following the process that's been set. They need to be part of the conversation, because as much as they slow the process down, they actually make it safer, and that safety means the technology goes farther, faster in the long run, because it doesn't create a huge breach, scandal or data leak where everything comes grinding to a halt. And then you have your people-people, the stewards of culture, of how people are feeling and grasping the change, and your stewards of operation, who love a process and are huge thinkers in designing the process and the steps. Altogether, those personas are essential.

JEMI: It's really important for leaders to learn to identify those personas in their teams, so they can help people become part of the process in a way that's comfortable for them, not just by telling them they have to adopt, they have to use the technology, this is what they have to do with it. It's much more psychological, because of what AI can do and how it operates, than installing Microsoft Word on your computer, opening a document and starting to type. It's completely different.

ANDREA: Very different. And I think for anybody watching, the invitation here is to pause and look around you. Who are the visionaries? Who are the early adopters, the person playing with all the things? Where are your guardians, maybe they sit in legal and risk, maybe they don't, saying, "Have we thought about what could happen here?" And where are you bringing those people in? If you're at one end of that spectrum, or one part of that flywheel, how can you seek out, which is not our natural tendency, the difference? Appreciating that where the two perspectives align is absolute gold.

JEMI: For leaders, for ourselves, it's about figuring out where we're coming from. Am I starting from a place of risk? Am I actually a guardian, asserting a level of scepticism and worry and risk-averseness on my team because of my natural disposition, and stifling the visionaries on my team who could help me understand what the road map could look like? Of course I want to protect the standards, but maybe I go and find that operational person who can help put some steps around this, meet me halfway between myself and the visionary, and then find the culture person and talk to them about how people are feeling, and the ideas they have to bring people into that process, because those are your people-people, great at engaging others and meeting people where they are.

JEMI: Even as a leader, it's important to know we might be one or two of these types ourselves, and that starting place influences how our teams are reacting. On the other side, if you're a complete visionary, you might have people on your team who are really risk-averse, and just having them try it, just do it, just click on things, they're not actually absorbing or learning anything, and that's not going to create value. At the end of the day, leadership in business is about creating value. Just asking people to click buttons and then saying our adoption rate is eighty per cent, when they just log in every day and click two or three buttons, doesn't mean anything, because there's no return on it. It's really important to create that culture for people to be part of the process genuinely, not just to appeal to the statistics of adoption.

ANDREA: And I can imagine, I've talked to people who are using AI essentially as Google. It's a search engine, and sure, it can do that, but that's not the highest value use by any stretch. Your adoption might look really great if that's what people are doing, but is it really generating value? Is that the best use case, the one that frees up humans to do the human work of connecting, relating, influencing, innovating, reasoning critically, and forward-pacing what we're doing and what we want this to look like. You've mentioned there's a psychological element here, and yes, how we're thinking about AI and leading in this changing landscape, there's very much a mental game, but there's also a nervous system game.

ANDREA: When we think about the pace of change that's happening in AI, it's not even like trying to drink from a fire hydrant, it's far beyond that. When we really get up close and see how quickly this is evolving, that very much feels threatening, not safe, purely at a physiological, nervous-system level. I just wanted to name that for anyone who sits there on a weekly basis thinking, "Oh my gosh, I can't keep up." Of course you can't. And maybe that's not the point.

JEMI: Yeah. The point is not to keep up. Myself, I'm immersed in this world every single day with clients, with research. I feel like I'm not even drinking from a fire hose, I'm underneath a waterfall. I often feel like I'm behind, and I remind myself that I'm not behind, I'm on the path. So what I talk about with a lot of leaders, they say, where do we start? You start from where you need to start. Where is your business, your team, today? Let's figure that out. What do they have in place from a tech perspective? What needs to be structured to make the AI really good?

JEMI: Lots of people have AI that's connected to really bad data, and therefore what you get out is horrible. So maybe that's what we actually need to think about, how do we create the right conditions, culture and understanding in your team, so that as this evolves, the team can grasp it, feels safe, feels comfortable, feels empowered to be part of that process. That's all work that has nothing to do with the actual clicking on the AI buttons, and it's almost more important at this point than the tech, which will keep evolving and changing. We need to think about what we do. What do we produce? What impact do we create? What could we do differently because we understand this technology? It's not just about increasing the speed of bad processes, or generating more of something that wasn't really good to begin with, it's a real opportunity to think about how this can look completely different, and how it can be better for us as the people doing that work. We want to spend more time connecting, we want outputs we can go and talk about, have a conversation about, that's really important.

ANDREA: So is this fit for purpose? Part of what I also hear you talking about is what's the strategy, what's the intent, and what's our operating system, the architecture we're working within, or placing AI within, because when we do that, it kind of doesn't matter what tools are evolving, whether everyone should be on Claude now because it's better than ChatGPT, or whether your organisation only sits in Copilot, or whatever tool you're using, and whoever leapfrogs whoever next, because we understand the overarching structure and intentionality we're approaching this with, rather than building expertise and skills in one very focused, finite area.

JEMI: Yeah, exactly. It's going to keep changing, and that's fine if we just have a base understanding of how it works, what it does, but where we want to go with it, what we want to do differently, and then apply what's available to that. We don't have to be able to do everything. I work in the AI space and I don't code software, because I don't need to, I can build dashboards, I can build chat tools, but I'm not creating AI tools for sale, for implementation inside businesses, because that's not my goal. So yes, I feel left behind in that space in some sense, but it's a decision I've made, that's not the direction I need to go in.

JEMI: We can all have different directions, different impact we want to make, different needs, and we're all starting from different places on this too. I always just say, get on the path, find a way to get on the path, figure out what it is I want to do differently, and what's my end goal from doing that differently. That's great if you get on the path. The path's sort of endless, but at least you're on it, you can start to walk it, and figure out what pace you want to go at.

ANDREA: It's very firmly a marathon, not a sprint. And I think that reminder, just to stay in the conversation, to notice what's going on, and lead ourselves enough to lean in, to still be present, to not look away, regardless of what's happening, regardless of how competent, regardless of how behind, all of those things we can quite legitimately feel.

JEMI: Stay engaged, stay curious, and play, experiment. I think the people I see getting the most value, not the most uptake, but the most value, are the ones who are genuinely curious.

ANDREA: I also hear you really naming the importance of keeping the end goal in mind. What is my point here? What is the why, what is the purpose, what am I driving towards, and does this serve it? That's such a powerful muscle in leading ourselves as well as leading a team. AI in many ways is the latest shiny object to challenge our ability to be focused, hold the destination, and be loose about the journey that it might require us to get there.

JEMI: Yeah, one hundred per cent. And that shiny-object situation, I speak with a lot of organisations and their leaders, and maybe they were very interested in the leadership aspect of things early on, but then all these tools dropped, and they said we have to use our resources for tech training and tech adoption and getting everybody using it, because we have to get the most value from this investment we've made. But inevitably, everyone comes back to the leadership development.

ANDREA: Yes.

JEMI: Because you can put those tools in place, but what's more important is everything we've spoken about, creating the environment, the momentum, the inspiration and the influence for everyone to actually want to sustain that process. Leaders are critical in doing that successfully, for the business outcome, but also for the mental health, the nervous systems, the psychological safety of their people. There's very much two sides to it that leaders have to be able to thread, and it's hard.

JEMI: It is genuinely hard. If it feels hard, it's because it is hard. It's a unique combination of skills we've had to flex together that there was no preparation for. And that's really real. I think just hearing that, and going, "Oh, okay, everyone seems like they just get it." No, they don't. They might look like they do. They don't. Everyone feels behind. Everyone feels like this moment is uniquely challenging. That's even chief AI officers I work with, that's their whole role, and it's one of the hardest roles in the world right now to do well, because it requires that unique combination of people, systems and tech. So it's okay if it feels hard.

ANDREA: Definitely okay. I remember getting my very first email address, I'm going to date myself here. I was at university, and the only people I knew who had an email address were in the computer lab with me, because we could get into the lab at one particular time. I failed to imagine a future where email would be a thing we live in and expose ourselves to. But I often think about that very beginning of the technology, of the system that is email, and where we've landed now, a couple of decades later, when it's so normal to have it everywhere. I think we're not particularly intentional about how we always use it.

ANDREA: And you've mentioned, are we just doing more of things, are we busy, are we creating more AI slop, if I'm using that term correctly, rather than thinking, what are we trying to do here, what's the best tool to do it? Are we likely to end up in a position where being stuck in your inbox, never able to get to inbox zero, which is a current tension a lot of people live with, is there an AI future where there's a version of that playing out, that we can maybe think about how to avoid?

JEMI: Oh, a hundred per cent. If we can avoid it, that's a big question. We are in such early days of AI. Like the AI we use now, and the way we use it, like you said with email, we used to play that game, snake, those used to be computer games. Look at what's available in gaming now, and what that experience is like, we couldn't have possibly imagined back then what that was going to look like today. So that's why I always say, if we just get on the path and start to understand where we are now, and be curious about it, there are very many people pushing to figure out what that future might become.

JEMI: Our only responsibility is, unless you're in the futurist space, and it's your responsibility to understand the future, that's a very specific role, someone is responsible for that, the rest of us can be curious about where we are right now, and hope we have leaders who can help us understand what the next two or three steps are that we need to take, and help us feel safe and secure on that path while the steps beyond that emerge. Lots of people ask me, we work on lots of 2030, 2035 plans, they ask, what happens after 2035? I say, if anyone tells you they know what it looks like past 2030, they're lying to you, because we just don't know. We don't know where that's going to go, how fast it's going to accelerate.

JEMI: So just focus on the next one, two, three steps on your own journey, on your own path to get there. Someone described the AI we use today, as amazing as it feels, as the MySpace of social media. I don't know if MySpace was huge in Australia like it was in the US, but if you compare where that was as a platform to what we have today with AI-generated images, video editing, that type of thing, you couldn't have imagined or predicted it, or done anything as an individual to prepare for what social media looks like today. So if you think about it the same way, I think it's much less daunting to just go, let me get involved in what I have in front of me right now, and stay a little curious about what might be coming next.

ANDREA: Yeah, stay curious, which does require us to feel grounded, to feel regulated, to have a little bit of space. So maybe by giving AI a specific task to do, and not watching it do the work, we can use a little of that space to lean into some curiosity. Nana has dropped into chat, talking about part of maturity being tracking adoption and the value that's being generated, and certainly, listening to you, Jemi, the emphasis would be on what value are we creating that we would not have been able to create before, because the exchange would have been wildly different. And Joselyn has asked a question about AI dependency, she's seeing a lot of that. How can leaders be more critical in their use of AI? I feel like we've talked around this a little, but do you have a specific answer to that one?

JEMI: Yeah, with dependency, it just comes down to, we can't just outsource our critical skills to these tools. We're building a dependency the same way we don't run to the library anymore to look up a single fact in an encyclopedia that's only in the public library. Remember having a friend at school whose family had a full set of encyclopedias? Or am I showing my age again, that used to be the kid in the neighbourhood with the full set of encyclopedias. Or you had to go to the public library, find that one page in that one book, photocopy it, take it home, highlight it, have stacks of it. In some ways, we still love to go to the library, but now we have the internet and we just look things up, and that is a form of dependence. When the Wi-Fi goes down, I can't be the only one who's like, I wasn't ready for today, I have all these things I'm going to do, and now I can't do them, calls get cancelled, plans get cancelled, that's a reality of the dependence on AI we're going to see, as it gets really embedded in the way that we do things.

JEMI: It goes down, causes a bit of chaos for a short amount of time, but the concerning dependence is when we start to actually outsource our human capabilities to the technology. Critical thinking, when you set up a process, you can't just ask an AI tool, what process should I apply AI to? You need to decide and make that choice. What am I applying this to? What part of that process is the right piece to give to the AI? What parts do I need to keep, because I either need to add creativity, or bring context and experience, that's a really critical decision. I can ask it for options, I can ask it for all the background research, but it can't make the choice, and it shouldn't be making that choice for you.

JEMI: Even when it acts on our behalf, when agents go into our folders, we need to tell them what folders to go into, and set those up in a safe way so it's not just accessing everything. Being able to do that, I think, keeps us from becoming too dependent on it actually doing the human things that prevent the AI slop, because we've looked at it and gone, this is actually really bad, this is a really bad LinkedIn post, a really bad report, this doesn't sound like me, it doesn't sound like a person, it sounds like AI. Take a step back and go, maybe that's not the right use of this technology, or let me try a different way. That's really important.

JEMI: I get asked a lot about young people coming into the workforce, and what happens if they don't develop the skills and expertise that sustain a legacy of leadership in any organisation going forward, if AI just does everything for them and they're so dependent on it doing the thinking, outsourcing the expertise. That's where development is critical when you're working with younger people coming through, helping them stay curious, understand how you build expertise for when the internet goes down, sitting with you, the apprenticeship of coming back and spending time with leaders, having conversations, understanding how two people have a leadership discussion, how decisions get made, letting them observe and be part of that, teaching them skills that existed before all this technology was in the workday. That will help them become experts.

JEMI: There's a huge uptick now in skills around philosophy, literature, understanding history and precedent, creative writing, poetry, journalism, investigative creativity, all of those can play such an important role in creating experts and limiting dependence. We become dependent on the tech to do the stuff, the way the internet does the stuff, Google does the stuff, but not outsourcing our unique human capabilities and knowledge.

ANDREA: There's a real place here for reverse mentoring, for people coming through without having had that apprenticeship, and also people later in their career who could really get a lot from leaning into AI and tools in a very different way. I think there's so much potency and power there. And the re-engineering of education, of the university system, is also really exciting, we used to do philosophy like Socrates, who wasn't asking how do I put these things together to create this other thing, he was thinking, what does it mean to be human, what does thinking look like, why am I leaning towards this and not that. Those very human skills and capabilities, a resurgence in that would be amazing. I am biased, I do have an arts degree.

JEMI: For a long time I was told that's not going into tech, and here we are. Not to say going into tech isn't valuable, if that's your interest, there's enormous value in that too. But it's the same skills. It requires critical thinking about these technologies, how they work, how they impact people, how we decide what's more important. It's the same skills that can be applied in any discipline, because at the end of the day, leadership is all about making those really hard decisions, and building the muscle to do that over years and years of practice, exposure and experience. That's really key in making all of this work in the long run.

ANDREA: Yeah, an intentional practice. I think there's something to be said for sitting in the discomfort, dealing with the friction, and finding a way to enjoy the process that gets you to the outcome. If I look at a lot of people creating a report or a road map or whatever it is, we can get to that output so much faster now if we leverage AI. However, is it the right road map? Is it the right report? The only way we can know is by sitting in the process of doing the thinking, the debating, the exploring, the uncertainty.

ANDREA: So I like this idea that we can potentially have a tool that lets us let go of a lot of the stuff that was pulling us down in organisations, working at lower levels, that doesn't need so much of our human mental capacity. That gives us more space to sit in the mildly uncomfortable things that make the outcomes and outputs we land on so much more powerful and fit for purpose. But if we also get used to things happening really quickly, and we remove all friction by using AI, we're not going to do that work, we're not going to use the time we have back to do those mildly uncomfortable things.

JEMI: I think that would be a problem. It's a challenge for future us to deal with.

ANDREA: It is.

JEMI: It's for people like me to deal with right now, and create the right guidance so we get to the right place in that future. It's something I love to do, I love to think about where this could go, good and bad, and what we need to be doing to get there. But for everybody else, be in your day-to-day, enjoy the time that a little action gives you back, and what you use that for, how much time you can get back. In a business sense, it's not just about, okay, I save time, I reduce wages, it's how much more impact can I create, for myself, for my team, for my clients and customers. What can I do that actually creates value, from not just more stuff, and incorrect stuff, because it's super biased and tells you what you want to hear. That's a whole discussion for another day.

ANDREA: It really is. And that speaks to our bias towards adding something rather than taking it away. I'm loving all the conversations I'm having at the moment about how we remove things to create more value, so counterintuitive, and so powerful. I'm really curious for the people listening or watching this on the replay, because I know for many of us AI is something that's quite conceptual, or we don't know where to start. The conversations where I've seen leaders get much more excited and confident about using AI are where we've spoken about a very specific thing they can go and do.

ANDREA: So if you're watching the replay, or here with us live, I would love you to drop into chat what's one thing you've used AI for, one very actionable, discrete thing that's added value, and then what did you use the time you got back to do? Would love to hear both sides of the equation. Jemi, from your point of view, for anyone listening today, what's one thing they can go and do, or think about, that would really keep them on that path in the AI space?

JEMI: Yeah, I really recommend, I think all of the human elements of this are exciting, but we actually have to be able to use the technology a little bit before we can unlock the human elements and the value. There are many, many free courses on any of your preferred tools, I'm completely tool-agnostic, I try not to play the game of one versus the other. But any platform of your choice now has launched completely free courses you can go and sign up for and take, and they're very approachable. They're not about the tech and the specifics, not about coding, they're just about how to get started, how to ask the right questions, how to set it up, how to connect things, systems.

JEMI: I just encourage people to use those free resources, because they're developed from a good place. Just start to learn, be curious, and move in that direction, wherever that starting point is for you, of that learning, and learning how to engage with the technology. I always try to leave people with, regardless of your feelings on AI and all of its impacts, on people, on the environment, I share many of the same sentiments, and I do this work because I want to have an impact on this going in the right direction, you can only have a qualified opinion and make a difference if you can articulate why. Being able to do that means starting to learn, being able to understand how it works a little bit, so you can ask the right questions, help move it in the right direction, make the right decisions, and influence people in the right way. So just start with the tech and the tools, through the very many free resources available from the platforms themselves.

ANDREA: Such a practical thing to lean in and do. And yes, completely tool-agnostic, I think it's important to play with a range of things. Something that came to mind as you were speaking is this idea that everyone's going to be different, and we can have conversations with people about what that looks like. So, be curious, stay in the conversation, not all day, every day, but maybe carve out a little moment, a little habit or routine for yourself, because if you're not part of the conversation, if we haven't had the opportunity to test and play, it's very hard to influence where this thing goes. And it is definitely going at a rate of knots.

JEMI: It definitely is.

ANDREA: Thank you so much for joining us, Jemi. It has been so valuable to have your insight and your expertise. Jemi and I will be keeping an eye on the comments for a little while, so if you're watching the replay a bit later, or here with us live, please drop something below if you have a question or an insight, and we'll come back to you there. Thank you so much for joining us, and I really hope you have one idea to take away, where you can leverage AI to create more value in your work, but also in your life, remembering that we are striving to create an experience where we love our work, but it also loves us back.

JEMI: Nice.

ANDREA: All right. Have a beautiful day, everybody. Thank you.