What Good Leadership Looks Like When AI Is in the Room
13 lug 2026
Most AI and leadership chats are full of demos and hype. This one will not be.
I sat down with the one and only Dana Rollinger for a live conversation on LinkedIn. She leads executive talent at a large pharma in Switzerland, and sees every day what companies actually expect from their leaders right now. I am the founder of The Change Republic and I help those same leaders figure out how to use AI without losing what makes them good at their jobs.
We talked straight.
No slides. No hype. Just the question that actually matters: what does good leadership look like when AI is in the room?
A few things we got into:
→ How to use AI without losing your own voice
→ What you can hand off, and what has to stay with you
→ How to stay clear and grounded when everything is moving fast
Because some things you just do not delegate.
What is the one part you would never hand to AI?
The parts of leadership AI cannot do for you
The most useful part of that conversation with Dana was not the AI use cases. It was naming, out loud, the short list of things that stay entirely human no matter how good the tools get: reading a room, holding a difficult message with care, deciding what matters when the data does not make it obvious, and standing behind a call once you have made it.
I see the same split with the leaders I coach.
→ The ones who use AI well treat it as a fast, tireless first draft: research, summaries, a first pass at a plan.
→ The ones who struggle either avoid AI entirely, or hand it too much, including the parts of the job that were never meant to be delegated, like the honest conversation nobody wants to have. Neither extreme holds up for long.
There is a growing body of research on what AI genuinely cannot pick up on, particularly the emotional and relational signals that sit underneath most hard conversations at work. I distilled some of that into a practical resource after my TEDx talk on the same theme, and wrote more on the broader shift in what changes when you build your own AI perspective.
If this is a question you are sitting with in your own team, whether AI is starting to blur which parts of leadership are actually yours, I have a free What AI Can’t Hear Pack, seven listening behaviours plus ten practical questions you can use with your team to talk about AI without fear or confusion. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources