The Most Expensive AI Mistakes Do Not Look Like Mistakes
12 Jun 2026
The most expensive AI mistakes do not look like mistakes.
The output looks fine. The session was fast. A week later, nobody can tell you what was actually concluded.
That is the opening of the new edition of our newsletter, out now. This is what you'll find:
↠ Three Mistakes That Keep Creeping Back: asking AI to do the thinking, trusting a good-looking answer too fast, letting it flatten your voice. Not the beginner mistakes.
↠ Visibility is Not Arrogance: notes from this week's AI-powered personal branding masterclass at Alpiq (300+ leaders dialing in from across Europe)
↠ One Last Thing: this Monday 15 June at 12:00 CET, our founder Tünde Lukacs is running a short free webinar with AI For The Real World and Anna Stando on AI for your meetings. Before. During. After. 45 minutes, hands-on. Register here.
The pattern we keep seeing: leaders do not need more AI. They need to know exactly what to use it for, and exactly what to keep for themselves.
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Want to think through what AI means for your own leadership? My Private AI Advisory is here.
The three AI mistakes that quietly cost the most
In Private AI Advisory work with senior teams, the mistakes that cost the most are never the dramatic ones. They look like progress, and they creep back even after people know better.
Three I see most often.
→ Asking AI to do the thinking, not the typing. AI is excellent at drafting, summarising and structuring. The moment you hand it the actual judgment, the decision about what matters, you give away the part of your job that is hardest to win back.
→ Trusting a good-looking answer too fast. Fluent and confident is not the same as correct. A polished paragraph buys trust it has not earned. The discipline is to check the answer, not the formatting.
→ Letting AI flatten your voice. Used carelessly, AI makes everyone sound the same. The voice people actually trust is yours, with its specific phrasing and point of view. Protecting it is a choice you have to make on purpose.
The thread through all three is the same. Leaders do not need more AI. They need to know exactly what to use it for, and exactly what to keep for themselves. That line between the two is the real skill now, and it is a human one.
If you want a practical tool for the human side of this, I have a free What AI Can't Hear Pack with the seven listening behaviours from my TEDx talk and ten questions you can use with your team to decide what to keep human. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources