Would You Send Your Robot to the Gym?

I don’t just hand them a book with all the rules needed to be an effective leader. Instead, they learn to write the rules. Leadership education is most effective when the students create their own knowledge rather than simply consume prepackaged insights that are curated for them, whether by me or an algorithm.

Armed with the knowledge they generate, they also practice the skills required to apply that knowledge. They learn to interpret their own behavior, construct personal frameworks, and distill their own lessons. In short, they do the hard work of making sense of their experiences, and through this, they master the ability to coach themselves—an essential capability that enables them to translate classroom insights into behavioral choices and improved outcomes long after any course has ended.

Let’s say you want to use AI to prepare for your difficult conversation. You could ask AI to generate a script for you to take into the meeting, and it would likely give you something that is coherent, structured, and persuasive, so you’d head into the meeting feeling prepared. As technological tools are designed to minimize effort, your preparation would have been fast and simple. After all, it is far easier to receive bullet points—whether from a lecturer, slide deck, or chatbot—than to generate them.

But simplicity is a warning sign that you likely would be underprepared and overconfident, not ready for a conversation that could veer off from the path you expect it to take. Think about what you do during that preparation time when unassisted. That’s when you wrestle with and process information, turning it into something meaningful and useful. It’s when you think through data and reflect, getting to the gist of the issue at hand. Creating your own script for the conversation involves an important distillation process during which you are expanding your capacity for leadership. There is no shortcut for this type of skill building.

That’s not to say that AI should play no role in your preparation, and perhaps the best use of AI in leadership is to guide you through cycles of hypothesis, action, feedback, and revision. When preparing for the conversation, you might start by drafting your own opening and key messages. Then ask AI to critique them from three perspectives: that of the employee, a senior leader worried about risk, and a coach focused on long-term development.