Artificial intelligence is rewriting the rules of executive leadership. In the past, senior leaders distinguished themselves through their ability to synthesize data, develop polished strategies, and produce complex deliverables. Today, those tasks are automated in seconds by tools that can summarize research, generate professional decks, and even write in the voice of a consultant.

What remains is the distinctly human work of judgment, discernment, and execution. The role of the executive is being reshaped in real time, and it is no exaggeration to say the stakes have never been higher.

In this episode of the Life + Leadership podcast, I sat down with Bright Arrow’s Chief Operating Officer, Maggie Gough, to explore how AI is transforming leadership, what skills now define executive readiness, and how leaders can adapt without losing sight of what makes them uniquely human. Below is a synthesis of our conversation, along with research and perspectives from thought leaders such as McKinsey. For a deeper discussion, I invite you to listen to the full episode.

How is AI changing the role of executives?

AI is stripping away the “good enough” layer of work. The information-gathering, deck-building, and surface-level analysis that once consumed weeks of a consultant’s or analyst’s time now happens in minutes. When McKinsey deployed more than 12,000 AI agents, those bots quickly automated tasks such as producing research summaries, building client-ready presentations, and generating insights in polished prose.

This reality forces executives to answer a new question: If AI can handle the analysis, what is left for me to contribute?

The answer lies in discernment, judgment, and execution. Leaders must step beyond producing knowledge and into guiding the application of that knowledge. Our value is proven when we translate insights into action, lead teams through disruption, and deliver context that no algorithm can replicate.

At Bright Arrow, we’ve experienced this firsthand. Maggie spearheaded our early AI integration, and it became clear that asking, “Could AI do this?” had to become part of every leadership conversation. This isn’t a threat to leadership—it’s a chance to clarify what only leaders can do.

When AI provides the strategy, what new value do leaders deliver?

In many organizations, boards and executives once relied on consultants to craft visionary strategies that looked beautiful on paper but often stalled in execution. That gap between strategy and reality has always been where Bright Arrow is called in.

Now, AI compresses the timeline. Strategy decks are produced almost instantly. The shiny plans are in hand. But what comes next?

Clients, teams, and boards are no longer satisfied with elegant concepts. They expect co-creation, collaboration, and measurable outcomes from day one. Executives can no longer sit at a distance in the sponsor’s seat; they must roll up their sleeves and build alongside their teams.

The leader’s value now lies in operationalizing strategy—translating AI’s output into aligned action and sustaining progress. This is not a diminishment of leadership but an elevation of it.

In a world with AI what new skills define executive readiness?

The AI era has introduced new imperatives for executive readiness. Three in particular stand out:

1. Learning Velocity – Executives must adapt faster than the market changes. The ability to experiment, learn, and iterate at speed is now a differentiator
2. Collaboration Across Silos – Leaders must extend influence beyond their own function, aligning teams across the enterprise to co-create outcomes.
3. Discernment – With AI generating endless analyses, the critical question becomes so what? Leaders must decide what matters and ensure focus is applied where it creates impact.

McKinsey’s own recruiting practices have shifted to emphasize adaptability and collaboration over pure technical expertise, a clear signal that these are not temporary skills but enduring requirements.

At Bright Arrow, we see this trend daily. Our work with executive teams is increasingly about helping them build muscles for adaptability and cross-functional collaboration, while training discernment as a core executive competency.

This has profound implications for succession planning and executive hiring. Organizations must begin rewarding and promoting not only based on expertise, but also based on these higher-order skills that AI cannot replicate.

How can leaders build resilience amid disruption?

Resilience in leadership has always been important, but AI disruption has accelerated the urgency. Leaders face constant rollouts, overnight system changes, and ongoing retraining—all while managing the business as usual.

Maggie described the exhaustion that comes from this cycle. Teams are constantly in learning mode, constantly adjusting, and often feeling like the ground is shifting beneath them. Leaders who ignore this strain risk burning out their workforce.

Resilient leaders respond differently:

• • They acknowledge the effort and name the exhaustion.
  • They celebrate persistence and normalize that fatigue does not equal failure.
  • They create room for recovery and rest, not just more output.

On our podcast, we joked that by the time the episode aired, new AI features would already be live. That joke carried truth: the pace is dizzying. Resilience means finding calm in that pace, reminding teams that disruption is the rule, not the exception.

How can leaders amplify the work only humans can do?

If your competitive advantage were stripped down to only what humans can uniquely provide, what would remain? That is the question executives must now answer.

The list is not long, but it is powerful: creativity, empathy, discernment, trust, and vision. Maggie raised a poignant example of how AI is blurring authenticity online. Bots generate LinkedIn comments that sound genuine, but we instinctively sense the hollowness. Leaders must protect the authenticity of human relationships and culture.

This is where the future of business resides. Organizations that invest in these deeply human skills will differentiate themselves from competitors who rely only on efficiency.

A practical checklist for leading with AI

Adopting AI is not about launching a standalone initiative; it’s about integrating it into the way you already lead. Here’s a checklist we use at Bright Arrow:

1. Acknowledge Reality – If you are using Microsoft or Google, AI is already in your business. Decide how to harness it intentionally.
2. Create Guardrails – Protect data, update policies, and make AI literacy part of the board and executive agenda.
3. Align to Strategy – Don’t isolate AI in its own roadmap. Instead, ask how it amplifies your existing goals.
4. Redefine Talent – Hire and reward for adaptability, collaboration, and discernment—not just technical skills.
5. Stay Human-Centered – Invest in relational leadership, creativity, and judgment. These are the differentiators AI cannot replace.

This checklist is not aspirational—it is operational. Organizations that adopt it will separate themselves from those who scramble to catch up.

The true work of leadership in the age of AI

AI is holding up a mirror to leadership. It reveals where we’ve leaned too heavily on analysis, too lightly on execution, and too narrowly on individual expertise rather than collective collaboration.

For some executives, this feels paralyzing. They admit they don’t know where to start. Our advice: start small, but start now. Experimentation is no longer optional. If you wait, the gap will only widen.

But this moment is also a profound opportunity. AI has clarified the stakes, challenged us to redefine value, and created space for leaders to focus on what matters most: discernment, creativity, and relational authority.

At Bright Arrow Coaching, we are working alongside executives to seize this opportunity. We are helping leaders not only survive disruption but redefine success within it.

The essential question is no longer what can AI do for us? The essential question is who will we become as leaders in this disruption.

Transcript

In today’s episode, I am joined by Bright Arrow’s very own COO, Maggie Gough. We’re going to dive into one of the most urgent and disruptive topics of our time, artificial intelligence, and how it’s rewriting the rules of high-value leadership.

It’s shifting what executives are expected to deliver. It’s raising the stakes on how we shape our organization. So in this episode, we’re going to cover the risks of not engaging.

We’re going to talk about the pressure of mid-sized companies, and we’re going to talk about the new skills every executive needs to prioritize in order to thrive through this time. If you’re wondering how to integrate AI without losing sight of what only humans can provide in your business, this conversation is for you. I am so excited to talk about this topic with you, Maggie, today.

Thank you for joining me as a co-host, co-conspirator on the topic of AI and the new rules of high-value leadership, which was inspired by, for our listeners to know, an article Maggie and I read in the Wall Street Journal entitled, AI is coming for the consultants. Inside McKinsey, this is existential. And the article itself was super interesting.

We’ll link back to it, of course. We’re going to talk about some of the main themes that came out of that. But then Maggie and I are going to overlay, number one, our own experience with leadership and trying to integrate AI as people who run a company.

But then two, we have the unique position of sitting across multiple companies as our coaches work inside of organizations. And AI and the disruption of AI and the integration of AI is such a hot topic in our coaching. And so we are really bringing a few different perspectives to the table in terms of how we’re going to frame our conversation today.

We’re going to keep it kind of informal. We’ll reference back to the article, the things we thought were interesting. As Maggie and I play off of each other, we’ll share naturally some of the stories that come up for us.

So rather unplanned and unscripted, of course, but we are really loaded to the gills with experiences here on this over the last couple of years. So Maggie, before I take us into this article, why did this article get you going? Or why is this topic, personally, have you kind of excited to talk about it?

Existential Stakes of AI

Maggie Gough

I think anytime we read stuff like this, where it just blows something up, I mean, even the word existential is such a powerful word that really describes how people are feeling and how quickly they’re having to navigate. And I was thinking about, in reference to this article, it was two years ago, two plus years ago, that I went to my first AI training. It was just a webinar about this is what this is.

These are all of the things that it can do. And there was a lot of imagination. And I think that the word existential brings us back to we are so far deep into this thing right now, that we have to respond in really meaningful ways and really quickly.

And that’s the existential piece of it. So what happens when I read articles like this is my mind blows way out to this, like what’s coming even next? What’s the further thing that I can imagine that’s happening here?

And then bringing it all the way back down to how did we get here? And how do we even navigate right now?

Lessons from McKinsey and the Changing Role of Consultants

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, beautifully said. And for listeners to have a little more context into my and Maggie’s world personally, Maggie and her team have spearheaded our own integration and implementation of AI. So she’s also lived the realities and the opportunities of it.

And she has a partner in me that’s like constantly saying things like, could AI do that? Could AI help us with that? I mean, it’s probably brought up a couple times a week in a conversation, from me at least trying to imagine more ways that we streamline or create efficiencies, leveraging the technology.

So she’s also got a really unique seat and perspective in this. So all right, well, let’s talk about McKinsey. Let’s talk about this article.

So McKinsey, gold standard for management consulting. The reason I love looking to organizations like this is number one, they are gigantic. Two, they are global.

Three, they have resources. So they’re able to often go first when we have major technological advances like AI. So I was really interested to read the article.

And the lessons here are direct, they are uncomfortable, and they are urgent and interesting. We as we talk with other CEOs at different organizations, one of the things we’ve come to understand is that it’s tough to be a middle sized player right now. I think it’s easier to be, you know, a smaller growing company like we are, because we have so much agility, we have very little bureaucracy or red tape, we can experiment rather nimbly.

It’s easier to be a humongous organization, like a McKinsey, for example, like I just said, so much resource, so many brains on board already that can help think broadly and globally about the implementation of tech. I think as we’re talking with CEOs who are more mid-sized, they’re really struggling with where to get started. They’ve often looked to us and asked us questions about how we’re using AI as an organization to try to find some inspiration for where they might also start.

So that’s unusual. I don’t know that it’s the mid-sized companies that typically don’t feel as advantaged, right? But I think in this, anecdotally, at least, I feel like being mid-sized is actually harder to figure out what to do with the AI piece.

So McKinsey apparently rolled out more than 12,000 AI agents, and those agents can write in the voice of their consultants. They can verify logic and arguments. The bots are able to summarize research and create polished decks within minutes.

So these are things that used to take very expensive consultants hours and hours, weeks, to deliver. So as a result, they’ve trimmed a lot of headcount. Teams that used to have an engagement manager, four consultants, and a partner, now they might have two or three consultants and an AI agent, a well-trained AI agent, according to what we’re seeing here.

So in clients, they don’t want just strategy advice at this point from the McKinsey’s of the world. They want co-creation. They want in-the-trenches execution and measurable outcomes.

Arguably, they always have. But when we were looking to consultants to first bring us data, synthesize data, and now that can happen in minutes, it’s cutting the lead time in these huge projects and the scale. And now what they’re looking for is intelligence and wisdom that their senior consultants embody, which is probably always what we’ve sought after, but often in these bigger engagements, you have to wait to get to that part for all of the analysis to happen first and the design of the strategy to come out.

And then you really get to get in the weeds with your senior consultant. But all of that precursor has been cut out. So quite fascinating.

Maggie Gough

Maggie, any reactions to that before I keep going? Well, I just want to add something really interesting, because again, we talk about the way that this is disrupting not only businesses internally, but I think about the broader context of this. Shortly after that article came out, in my LinkedIn messaging was a message from a woman who said, we are a group of ex- McKinsey graphic designers.

And so they were promoting themselves as highly qualified, highly expert graphic designers who had left en masse and created their own business as a response. And I just thought to myself, well, if McKinsey has used AI to replace that service, how could I? And so I felt a ton of empathy for that group of graphic designers and the way that they’ve been replaced kind of overnight.

And also, it’s disrupting my own thinking about all of the things that are fully capable.

From “Good Enough” to Deeper Value

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, it seems limitless where we could go. And yet, one of the things I’m hearing from our CEO clients is the hesitation around adopting too much AI before we have landmark case studies about, as we know, you know, when anything new and disruptive happens, especially in tech, it is the Wild West. There are very few rules.

We’re relying on huge companies to operate ethically, out of goodwill, not necessarily because we have regulation around it. Regulation comes from landmark court cases. We have not had any of those yet.

So a lot of our CEOs and boards are very concerned about data privacy and ethics and confidentiality, as they should be. And so also that is preventing some organizations from moving too quickly if they don’t have their own in-house resources to create and manage their AI and data sets. So I find that interesting.

I think a lot of that is going to change quickly. You know, Maggie and I, as we were preparing to record this, were laughing because this thing’s going to go live. And who knows what will have happened by the time production has finished the episode?

I mean, we may have already be outdated. I sure hope not. But like, it’s crazy how fast it’s moving and changing.

So one of the main points, I’m going to turn this over to you, Maggie, because I know you really thought and talked about this a lot with me, is that AI is going to erase that good enough layer. So why don’t you take our listeners through that concept a little bit more?

Building Resilience and Shifting Mindsets

Maggie Gough

We brought it up earlier and it was really well articulated in the article that AI can crunch so much data. And it can crunch it well when you have the right parameters in the right systems to be able to look at only the data and avoid hallucinations and the like. And so what before, again, would have taken a lot of time to pull all of that analytics in and to have people put their brains on it, can happen in seconds.

And so it allows us then to look at rich analytics, apply human expertise, and go a layer deeper and a layer deeper. And so we’re no longer looking to internal leaders or external consultants to give us the basics of analytics before we all go a layer deeper. So I think when we’re talking about what is good enough, the good enough is we have pulled a massive amount of data together and we’ve looked at it.

That is now good enough, which would have been a really healthy and robust step before. That’s now just good enough. Now it’s you’ve already done that in seconds.

What’s next? And how have you made this better with your expertise, with your institutional knowledge of this workplace, or of this client, or other clients that you could apply here that they might not have thought of?

Tegan Trovato

Fascinating. We also mentioned that the article cites the move from management consulting as advisor to co-creator. And the term used in the article was that McKinsey’s moving away from, quote, sage on the stage model.

And one industry leader in the article said that the age of arrogance of the management consultant is over. And so I’m gonna make real what that may mean. This is how I interpret that.

So at Right Arrow, a lot of times we will come in to work with the C-suite team after they have paid millions often for strategic consulting and a strategic plan. And the plans are gorgeous. I’m not going to knock the work.

They are delicious. But they are also extremely sophisticated, and most organizations do not have the leadership or the skill to operationalize the strategy. And so we’ll often join the C-suite in trying to parse out what is really meaningful.

How can we roll up our sleeves and make this happen in our organization and not just have spent millions on a beautiful deck that our board loved, that we then cannot create results from? And what’s interesting is that with the movement with AI, now clients who are consumers of management consulting are expecting that the business is going to be able to roll up its sleeves and implement and align the teams and be part of the execution layer. So no longer just the executive sponsors of the consultant and the consulting engagement where they’re sitting, you know, behind closed doors being interviewed, creating these beautiful strategies.

Now, thanks to AI, both in management consulting and AI inside of our organizations, CEOs should now start to expect that our executives can implement better. And frankly, that is not always a core skill. And they shouldn’t be the ones in the weeds doing it.

The point when I say that for an executive to implement a strategy and to really operationalize it is that they get that work done through their leadership teams. But I don’t think we have always been great about taking consultant product and doing that. So AI, according to this article, is shifting us into that landscape, which is new for both the management consultant and the more senior leaders inside of the organization.

So it’s time to rethink then, this is what I extrapolate, that we build a different kind of culture when it comes to creating and implementing the strategy. And that is going to have to happen as quickly as AI has already happened to and for us. So I think that time is upon us now and it’s going to be interesting.

And that’s going to change who we want to hire. So the talent equation is going to change. McKinsey’s own recruiting priorities have shifted.

They are now looking for two key things. CEOs, senior leaders, please listen up. This should be an apples to apples for our organizations.

One, they’re looking for learning velocity. So the ability to adapt faster than the market changes. This is not new.

We have been living in this. But have we made it part of our executive search criteria? Nope, we haven’t.

I can tell you that for sure. So that is certainly number one. Second is collaboration skills.

And Bright Arrow, frankly, wouldn’t exist if executives had great collaboration skills. We are brought in to work with executive teams to help them develop that at a more sophisticated level than when they were working on functional leadership teams. So the ability for our future talent to work cross-functionally and influence other functions is going to be more important than it’s ever been.

So that is our new talent profile I want us to all be thinking about. And so as a CEO, I want us to be thinking about updating our succession plans. How do we demonstrate that we value adaptability as much as we value expertise?

And how will you reward your executive teams for partnering across silos and making sure this stuff actually happens? So I’m selfishly excited that this is one of the changes AI has brought. This is a mantle we’ve been carrying at Bright Arrow for a long time, that it’s actually the inability to work collaboratively and outside of our fiefdoms and silos that stalls out the implementation of a strategic plan.

And that has been clarified further because AI has pulled back the covers. And I appreciate this article for kind of calling that out. The other thing I will say when it comes to the talent equation that I’m just going to assert here that was not listed in the article is that we really need senior leaders and executives to continue to be discerning with the so what.

So AI is going to produce decks, beautiful things. We had one of our C-suite coaches report back to us that he’d heard quite a bit of feedback from a couple of executives that they were exhausted by how many decks and presentations they were suddenly getting. So look smart, may not actually have teeth, right?

So the plans may look smart, they may not actually have teeth or merit. So I think that one factor I would include there is that while learning velocity, we want to be able to go fast, that velocity, yes. Speed to production may not be the actual value we’re looking for out of AI utilization or organizations.

We still need our leaders to be discerning about, so what? Like we put this together and the data says X, but so what? Our executives and C-suite do not need to be sitting around reading more PowerPoints.

We need more leaders who can discern what’s valuable and not for the organizations. So that’s a piece I would insert here when it comes to that talent equation.

Maggie Gough

I just want to jump in too and say in one of the trainings I was in with some AI experts, they talked about how the utilization of AI has the risk of hampering our creativity. And for this exact reason, because we can take our initial thoughts and we can ask AI to crunch them and turn something else out. But if we don’t go back and then discern what does this thing mean?

If I can’t say to you, Tegan, I’ve created the deck, here’s what I want to do. If I can’t tell you and that will get us and then we will do, then I have left my own wisdom. I’ve left my own institutional knowledge.

I’ve left my own creativity out of the package. And so I think what our coach was referencing was that there are a lot of people who are wanting to promote their ability to use AI, to create something interesting, to apply new thoughts. But this is that layer deeper.

You have to then apply your own creativity. And I also want to add, you had mentioned adaptability and agility, that creativity is a part of that. Internally in yourself, you have to be applying a lot of creativity.

You’re deploying your own imagination to be adaptable. So you have to get comfortable with all of those wild scenarios that you can dream up to then lean into your own adaptability to those scenarios.

Tegan Trovato

Well said. I totally agree. And you know, it’s so funny, we’re talking about tech and the value of our imaginations.

Those are not two things we necessarily thought would be cousins in this process, but I totally agree that it is. And we need that even more than ever for imagining the future of our organizations, right? So it makes sense that it would be inserted there.

So Maggie, you are resilience queen, if I may say. Like you think about it a lot. You help our clients think about it a lot.

Coaches think about it. You and I live that journey together of resilience inside of our own business. So what would you say is a great checklist for our executives and CEOs who are listening when we reflect on this article and reflect on the things you and I have asserted based on what we’re seeing with our clients?

What’s a punch list that CEOs should kind of have on their desk when it comes to AI?

Maggie Gough

When I think about just resilience in general, and I’m going to speak a little bit from my own experience, from an operations perspective, having to deploy this stuff across functions, across systems, and some of our own internal, probably not full burnout yet, but I could see where we would get there. The first thing about resilience is recognizing where you feel really drained. So we have had several applications that we use all the time who have deployed AI in those applications.

And overnight, my team is having to respond to not only a new user experience, but also the AI within that tech, sometimes doing things that we do not want it to do. I mean, we had some financial software that took financial data and read it incorrectly. And so we have to have our eyes on the ball with these changes.

We cannot just expect that AI is going to do it better. That can be a place where we start to feel drained over time, because we’re already putting out maybe a fire over here. And then the next thing in our tech stack, deployed AI, and this fire is still not out, and now we’re responding to this one.

And so there’s been a required persistence and diligence. And when you have to try to be persistent and diligent over time, while actively being creative, agile, and adaptive, those are often things that are going to pull you in different directions. And so I just want to acknowledge the reality that leaders are living in.

I’ll say the other part of this for us is when we’re being adaptive and agile internally, we will understand a new model, determine how we’re going to deploy that, build it out. And then two weeks later, again, whatever system we’re interacting with has come up with a better way that they were going to do that thing. And now we have to retrain ourselves, relearn, and rebuild.

So one of the things that I would applaud Tegan and I at is acknowledging for our team that effort, because that’s real. And when they are in high detail roles, and they’re doing that over and over again, we need as leaders to acknowledge the resilience that they’re bringing to the table to do this across multiple systems, because that’s also real. Maggie, beautiful.

Well, I mean, here’s, I guess, the greatest bit of advice, I think, in my background in corporate well-being, for leaders, when we think about our employees well-being and their own resilience, where you are feeling drained, you are not failing, you’re not missing the mark. That is your clue to understand that the people who are working with you feel the same things. That’s your cue to tune in to where they also might be feeling drained and struggling.

And this is back to that co-creator point, Tegan. I think we then as leaders become co-creators in this thing that is rapidly evolving, because we’re feeling it in the same ways that our employees are feeling it, if that makes sense.

Tegan Trovato

Absolutely.

Maggie Gough

And also, just when we talk about resilience, it is not the ability to just keep carrying the same thing to no end. We are not forever adaptable and agile and resilient. Resilience requires rest.

So when you hit those speed bumps in the work internally, or with what you’re developing for your client, if it’s possible, deploy some rest for yourself and for the team, so that you can come back to those skills that you need to deploy day after day.

Tegan Trovato

So this is all about really a mindset shift at the end of the day. You know, I’ll share, I was at an event where I live in the city I live in with a bunch of other executives from different companies, and a lot of folks were just like paralyzed. We just don’t know where to start.

We know it’s important. And one of the points I raised, and I do believe this, and I talk about this with my personal CEO clients who I coach, if you are not already using it, you are behind. And you will be behind so fast if you don’t pick something and give it a shot.

And that goes for our organizations. So to Maggie’s point, it’s already turned on. If you’re using Microsoft, you already have AI.

If you’re using Google’s tech stack for business, you already have AI. It’s already in your business. So really, the question is, how do you want to intentionally use it?

And the other piece, I think, from a mindset perspective is, as executives, are we creating a culture of welcoming that, being sure we aren’t ignoring the fear that might be prevalent in our organization around job loss, potential job loss, or changes? If we’re not talking about AI in our company and cultures, we are definitely leaving the chat to drive the culture for you. And that will be so dangerous because you will be using AI amply.

And so letting the narrative run itself is going to bite you later. So get in front of it. Lock arms as an executive team about what your vision is for it.

At least acknowledge that it is there. Encourage people to be curious. Set really tight parameters around what they are allowed to use and not use.

Have people sign updated policies around it to protect your clients, your customers, and your business. Thanks, Maggie’s laughing because that’s what we did last year right away.

Maggie Gough

And I’ll add, we had a moment where we were like, wait, did we clearly say this? Because I hope we did. And luckily, we had done our work.

Tegan Trovato

Yeah, we knew we’d put a policy in place. We were like, were we specific about these one or two things later? And then think, we were so proud of our previous selves for being so smart.

These are the things that you need to be in front of because it is available. The tech is available. Your employees are going to use it.

How do you want your data out there or not? Create the policies around it. And make sure AI literacy is on the agenda with your board, internally with the executive team.

And just like this article suggests, it is really time to invest in talent that learns fast. And something I will say here is that, you know, as someone who coaches folks who are often later in their careers, even approaching retirement, we can sometimes find a theme of our leaders wanting to outsource the necessity to understand how things work and the tech and that we want to just do things the way we’ve done it and how we produce our own work. This is not a moment where that’s going to work for us anymore.

It does not matter what generation of workforce you are. It does not matter your positional authority. This is one of those things that you need to learn fast.

I will compare it to this. It’s almost like the Internet being invented. If you ignored the Internet being invented at work, you were not going to be employed.

Right. So I think this is a good parallel. So while we’re investing in talent that learns fast, we really need to challenge ourselves and the folks that are already inside of our organization that we expect them to do the same.

And that may become a norm in your company and not just a skill you’re hiring for.

Maggie Gough

So a couple of calls to action to think about. I’ll just add to one caution. A lot of companies, especially when they hear if you’re not doing it, you’re already behind, want to bring everybody together and the executives can go, we need to create an AI roadmap.

You are not creating an AI roadmap. You have a strategic plan as an organization, which you’re asking of your executive team and of your employees is what can AI evolve within this roadmap? Because what we don’t want is to just say this is a thing and it’s going to disrupt everything.

And then you’re just trying to put AI as the thing that you’re driving versus your own corporate strategy and your own corporate outcomes. So the question is, what does AI do within our already existing goals to amplify our opportunity to get there?

What Only Humans Can Do and Closing Thoughts

Tegan Trovato

Well said. Don’t get distracted by the thing. Just learn how to work with it.

I love that. Some things that I would challenge our CEOs and our executives to be thinking about is, one, and man have I thought about this for our own business. We’re in a highly human business as executive and team coaches.

But what in your business could AI do tomorrow that you believe your team can only be the ones that do today? So make the list. And then two, if you stripped your competitive advantage down to only what humans can uniquely provide, what would that be?

That’s the reality of what your business model is going to look like tomorrow. So I think question two is probably a great starting point. If you stripped your competitive advantage down to only what humans can uniquely provide, what would be left?

And that is really the place to start thinking about your future strategic plan and your org design. And I would say this last bit, you know, I, on occasion, will meet with all of our coaches across the U.S. for one-on-ones and just check in, like, what are your clients seeing? What are you hearing?

What are you noticing out in the world? And I will send a summary.

Tegan Trovato

All those calls went and some of the themes that came out of it, and I was really led to ask this question of everyone and ourselves at Bright Arrow and due to the amount of disruption we’re experiencing from AI. And the question is, what does success look like in this context? There’s so much we could choose to do that we are often choosing to do nothing out in the world with this, and I think that’s a mistake.

But we’re all in very different starting points that make sense for the size of our businesses and what it is we do and offer and the value we create. So I would ask you to also think about what does success look like for us in this context? And what does it look like to stay curious about this?

And remember, I did send our coaches this image of all the disruptive events the U.S. has experienced over the last 30 years. And we’re due for another one. They’re coming fast these days.

It seems like they’re ample and frequent. But this is something I think we need to normalize. This is just another disruption.

We actually know how to navigate through disruption. This one just has a different flavor. So as much as there’s fear and concern and just major discomfort over the speed of things, which I do not blame anyone for feeling, I have my own feelings of that, we should also take a breath and go, yeah, this is how our world works.

This is how fast it goes and how it changes. So how do I want to be in this? And who will our organization be in this as well?

Maggie Gough

Maggie, any closing thoughts from you? Yeah, I just have one note I want to add to the what only humans can do. And I want to just speak from some of the experiences that you and I have had interacting with AI in the world now.

And yesterday, I had a social media post that immediately, immediately had three comments. All three of those individuals were people who want to sell to me. And they were insightful comments.

But they weren’t actually those people commenting. They were likely bots. And so then later in the day, as I was looking on LinkedIn, I came across someone’s story.

I did not know this person. It was in my feed. And it was a really heart-wrenching story.

And I found myself growing callous because all of a sudden, I didn’t know if this was a real person or not, or if it was a bot. That is already happening, and that’s real. So I had to challenge myself to understand that that’s happening in me already.

And when we think about the work that only humans can do in our business, there are things that humans are doing that we can outsource to bots. And that might be the right answer. But it’s also worth challenging ourselves if outsourcing that to bots degrades our brand, degrades our strategy, degrades what we want our company to look and feel like in five years.

And so there are really quick wins and ways that we can apply this and save money and scale resources. All of the things we want to do as business leaders. But I think that that comes with, and again, this goes back to our own wisdom, our own creativity, our own desires to leverage really powerful technology to make the world a better place for us, for our clients, for our employees.

And so I think we just want to be really thoughtful about those things as we’re moving forward, because this is massively disruptive. And things that are massively disruptive can go really well, and they can go not really well. So I think we just be really intentional about those things.

Tegan Trovato

Great closing thought. Thank you, Maggie. So we are curious to hear from you.

Go read the article. Again, we’ll put the link in there for the Wall Street Journal article. Curious as senior leaders what your biggest takeaway is from the McKinsey pivot, what that might mean for you and your business, not necessarily just as a consumer of management consulting services, but also what does this mean for you?

Thank you for joining us for this conversation on AI and the new rules of leadership. I hope it sparked some new ideas for you and how you lead and where you need to adapt and how you may help your team to build resilience in the face of this disruption. Remember, AI is already embedded in your business.

The question’s not if you’re going to use it. The question’s how intentionally will you choose to use it? Until next time, we’ll see you back here on the Life in Leadership podcast.