Using AI to replace your leadership presence, whether through AI video clones, copy-pasted team messages, or scripted feedback, erodes team trust and accelerates disengagement. Lia’s framework is simple: use AI to brainstorm and prep, but never let it substitute for the human moments that make you indispensable. This episode is essential for any leader wondering how to stay relevant and keep their team motivated in the age of AI.
This episode is part of the AI for Leaders & Teams series. Browse all episodes →
Mic drop moments
“…if we don’t really know what problems we’re solving, we might jump at a solution that actually causes more confusion, slows things down, and actually makes things more expensive.”
“When people hear AI, they think I am going to be replaced. I’m telling you, right? Because that’s what the overarching narrative is.”
“…why would we start replacing people and functions when we have our own stuff, we need to be cleaned up. That’s the place to start.”
“…if we’re not bringing critical thinking, then we’re not bringing that human lens to the work enough. So this is a skill we’re going to need more than ever.”
Episode highlights
The question every leader needs to ask before buying any AI tool
Clients come to Lia excited about a new software that promises to make everything easier, faster, and cheaper. Her first response is always the same: what problem are you actually solving? Without a clear answer, automation does not simplify things. It adds a new layer of confusion on top of the old mess, often making workflows slower and more expensive than before.
Why your team goes quiet (or hostile) the moment AI comes up
Lia coached a VP at a startup whose team was openly resistant to a new hire brought in to lead AI strategy. The team was dismissive and uncooperative, and the VP assumed it was a respect issue. Lia’s read was simpler: fear. When people hear “AI,” they hear “your job is next.” She has another client at an engineering company where leadership routinely asks, after any mistake, whether AI would have caught it. That kind of environment turns a tool into a threat. Leaders have to name the fear directly, not hope it resolves on its own.
The three use cases where AI genuinely earns its place
Lia identifies three areas where automation creates real value because they are problems teams have never had clean solutions for before.
– Information flow. Decisions made at the top rarely reach people four or five levels down. Most employees have no idea how their role connects to company priorities. AI can help format and cascade that strategy at the right level of detail for every audience. – Data aggregation and research. A marketing team pulling industry trends for a client can use AI to surface data faster and more completely, then apply human expertise on top of that foundation for higher-quality output. – Doc connecting and meeting notes. Tools like Fathom and Otter are low-hanging fruit. Nobody wants to take meeting notes, the information was getting lost, and now it doesn’t. That is a real problem with a real AI solution.
The problems AI will never fix
High turnover is not solved by replacing humans with automation. If people are leaving, there is a culture issue, a psychological safety issue, or a lack of clarity around how to grow and what success looks like. Recognition, role specificity, and clear performance expectations are what reduce turnover, and none of those come from a software subscription. The same goes for hard conversations and feedback. Those require leadership skills, and the answer is a coach, a trainer, or practice, not a chatbot.
The trap of solving for cost before solving for clarity
Lia is direct: if the only goal is cutting labor costs by replacing people with AI, that is a different conversation from this one. And even from a pure cost perspective, it often backfires. The holes around information flow, data aggregation, and decision communication still exist after the headcount reduction. Without people to identify where things are breaking down, teams fall further behind. Technology plays whack-a-mole on problems that were never diagnosed in the first place.
A two-part diagnostic your team can use starting today
Lia’s framework comes down to two questions. First, what is the actual breakdown happening on the team right now? Is it a skills gap, a communication gap, a visibility gap? Second, once the problem is named, is the right solution a leadership competency or an automation tool? Often it is both. You build the delegation skills and then use an automation to help move tasks down the chain. But it has to start with the diagnosis, not the tool. When leaders model this kind of root-cause thinking, they also build it in their teams, which makes every person on the team a better, more future-proof problem solver.
Related episodes in this cluster
- Ep 232: What to say when your team is scared about AI (and what not to say). When your team hears “AI,” they immediately think their job is on the line, and if you haven’t addressed that fear directly, it runs silently in the background of every conversation. Lead with your vision for how AI enhances your team’s work rather than replacing it, and save 10 to 15 hours per project by targeting the tasks that were never the core of anyone’s job. This episode is most useful for owners and leaders who need to open the AI conversation without triggering a productivity crash or a quiet exit.
- Ep 208: What AI should replace on your team (and what it should not). AI can handle tactical tasks like notetaking and scheduling, but replacing an entire role means losing the invisible human value that holds teams together. Lia walks through a practical way to audit what to automate versus preserve, using the example of an executive assistant whose real job was culture, candor, and translation. This episode is most useful for founders, operators, and leaders who are under cost pressure and tempted to automate their way out of staffing decisions.
- Ep 197: How to navigate the Gen Z and Gen AI collision on your team. The tension between Gen Z workers and AI tools creates three specific problems for leaders: entry-level jobs disappearing, critical thinking skills going undeveloped, and team members outsourcing work entirely to AI. The fix is not banning the tools but training people to think first and use AI second. This episode is most useful for owners and leaders who are watching their newer team members default to copy-paste AI output instead of doing the real work.
- Ep 189: The hidden cost of using AI as a leadership shortcut. Using AI to replace your leadership presence, whether through AI video clones, copy-pasted team messages, or scripted feedback, erodes team trust and accelerates disengagement. Lia’s framework is simple: use AI to brainstorm and prep, but never let it substitute for the human moments that make you indispensable. This episode is essential for any leader wondering how to stay relevant and keep their team motivated in the age of AI.
Want to go deeper?
The Manager Essentials Program. Lia’s flagship program for new and rising managers.
Full transcript (click to expand)
I just heard from this software company that’s going to automate my backend, they’re going to make all my work easier, faster, cheaper, everything’s going to be amazing, it’s going to be incredible. I want to sign up. This is what I hear every single day from my small business owner clients. And the question I ask is, well, what problem are you solving here? And I met with Curricus, because there is so much excitement around onboarding AI tools and utilizing them and replacing roles that are feeling redundant and inefficient.
I get it. And we all do have to be saving money right now, like everything’s really tight. But if we don’t really know what problems we’re solving, we might jump at a solution that actually causes more confusion, slows things down, and actually makes things more expensive. So that’s what we talked about today. I’m Leah Garvin, and this is the new Manager Playbook. And I’m sharing tools, tips, strategies for being a great manager, for leading with confidence and ease in this era of AI, where everything’s changing, and people are saying that your job can be automated.
That’s what I talked about last week. Manager jobs cannot be fully automated. And if you missed that one, tune back in, because this is a really important moment for leaders, for managers, for business owners, for whoever you are listening to figure out, how do we stay relevant? How do I support my teams in the right way? Where do we utilize AI tools or not? So that’s what we talked about today. How to really discern, because that’s our role as humans, to be discerning, how do we discern when is the right moment to utilize AI, because there are so many incredible examples.
There’s so much ease it can add to your personal workload as a leader, to your teams, to really free them up to do more of the human thinking work that a lot of times folks don’t even have time for when they’re so overloaded, right? It can really add to your capacity. There’s just so many great uses for it. But how do we not use it in a way that actually creates chaos? Because I want to say, right now is a moment where there is so much kind of hysteria around it.
So much just talking like, hey, we’re going to put that in AI and automate this, that even when you talk about AI, if it’s not, you know, even if you’re like, hey, we’re going to utilize these AI use cases or reason this way, people immediately assume, oh my gosh, you’re going to replace my job. And this showed up with a client, I coach a VP working on strategy operations in a startup. And she shared that there was a lot of resistance around a new tire that was running like AI strategy for the startup.
Folks are feeling really frustrated, they’re disagreeing with all the things that he was suggesting and they’re not really kind of, you know, treating him with respect and kind of listening to his perspectives and things like that. And I said, well, it’s obvious what’s going on. And she said, well, what do you mean? Like I think they just kind of need to be more deferent to some of the leadership in our team. I said, well, yeah, they’re afraid.
That’s a fear response. When people hear AI, they think I am going to be replaced. I’m telling you, right? Because that’s what the overarching narrative is. And that’s happening in places. This is a real situation. I have another client that works in an engineering company. And whenever something goes wrong, leadership asks like, well, would this have been resolved with AI? So there was a threat. There’s a true threat. Okay. Now, the reality is these tools are not fully replacing us overnight and there’s a lot of opportunity to utilize them in the right way.
This is why we have to understand this as leaders. We cannot just hope that it just like works itself out. This is coming. It’s here. And we need to be thoughtful about it. So you as a leader, I want to equip you with the most empowering and the most important question around understanding AI and how does it apply to your team? And that is what problem am I trying to solve? Am I trying to connect the, like what problem that you do?
We have like a doc connection issue. Like information is not getting from one person to the next. Is it that we need to create like a lot of volume of work, multiple iterations and things like that? Do we need research and data aggregation? What problem are we solving? Because when we know that, we know the specific use case to figure out, well, where will AI and automation really support with this? The three situations I talked about around information flow, data aggregation, doc connecting, those are really great use cases for AI, right?
Let’s say you are working in a marketing team and you want to aggregate trends in a certain industry for a client, utilizing AI or news aggregators to say, hey, what’s market analysis? What’s trends? What’s going on? And then having that human look, oh, okay. Based on my experience in this world, based on my understanding and expertise in marketing, let me layer on that human analysis, right? But pulling all that research, like maybe you can save that person a ton of time and actually generate higher quality output because they found data that maybe they wouldn’t have found as easily.
Dot connecting across and just decimating information is another one, right? Like that’s a huge challenge in teams. Folks not having information cascaded down from leaders all the way to every rung of the organization is a really big challenge. That’s something that we haven’t in the past had really straightforward ways to solve. Leadership teams have meetings, they set priorities, they set goals. But when you get all the way down, four, five, six levels down the organization, what you see more often than not is people have no fricking idea what the priorities are, what the strategies are.
They sure as hell don’t know how their job fits into the bigger picture. That’s something that we could really utilize AI around, right? Here’s the strategy, what are ways in which we can communicate this? How can we share this at these different levels of detail? That’s a great use case because nobody was doing that, right? So that’s actually a great place to use it like, hey, what would we have on our team in our business, in our company?
What are the gaps? What are the big problems? What are the challenges? That’s the first place to utilize AI, right? Why would we start replacing people and functions when we have our own stuff, we need to be cleaned up. That’s the place to start, okay? So another, I work with a events agency and they struggle with having everyone have a full picture of all the work happening, right? That’s a great use case for AI, right? That’s a problem.
Hey, visibility information, what’s going on at bird’s eye view, that is a actual problem that they have that no one has been able to crack. Now we utilize AI to help with that. See what I’m saying? So we don’t just go, oh, well, I heard that I can save this amount on labor if I replace this person who was actually doing a pretty good job, but they’re expensive because they’re human. How can I replace that? That’s a different phase of this whole thing, right?
That’s not what I’m talking about here. I want you to utilize these tools in a way that actually enhances your business and amplifies it and doesn’t create new problems. Because let’s just be honest, if you are utilizing AI and just replacing roles and things like that, and you have all of these holes around cascading information, around aggregation of data, around doc connecting, around research, those holes will still exist. And then you don’t have people identifying where they are.
And so you will actually get further behind by doing this out of order because that’s the thing with technology is it’s going to play kind of like whack-a-mole on these things. We want to understand really how to weave all of it together. And that’s where your discernment as a leader, your understanding of the bigger picture and your diagnosis of the problems are going to come into play. So this is what I really want to empower you with that question.
What are the challenges that are showing up on the team today? And I’m going to tell you right now, it’s often decisions not being communicated down the chain. That’s when I hear in every company, whether it’s Google or it’s a three-person law firm, it’s the same, okay? Decisions feel opaque. I don’t know how to weigh in decisions. I don’t know what they are. I don’t know how they’re communicated. That is a pain point we have not addressed yet.
People haven’t addressed it yet. Let’s figure that one out. Another is, gosh, having hard conversations, I don’t feel prepared for that, right? That’s another problem. That’s a people thing, okay, right? Another challenge is information is not communicated out of meetings, right? Well, hey, those meeting note takers, Fathom or Otter or whatever they are, those have been invaluable for making sure we’ve got notes. They’re going to the meeting attendees, right? That’s an AI solution. So we want to figure out the problems first, then we know, oh, okay, this one here around the feedback, around the difficult conversations, that’s something we really need some leadership skills built around.
We’re going to bring in a consultant or a coach or a trainer, we’re going to really tackle that because that’s the human stuff. The meeting notes, nobody wants to take meeting notes and it’s like the worst task ever. That’s an AI solution because nobody was doing that. So this is the reality is when we get really clear on the problems and when we become experts in diagnosing what are the breakdowns happening on the team, then we can apply the right solution.
And it’s not going to be AI full stop, and it’s not going to be avoiding AI because there’s so much opportunity by utilizing different tools. I mean, Notetaker is like literally the lowest hanging fruit. I think we’re all using that stuff now, right? Because the information flow was a really, really big pain. So what are cases like that? How do people get that flow of information? Another is, what else shows up in teams? Well, time management, that’s the biggest one in delegating, right?
So maybe you figure out a solution where you build your skills leadership wise around delegating around how do you communicate expectations and requirements, and then maybe utilize something with AI and automations to help kind of move those tasks down the chain, right? A two part solution. But it’s first born from having an actual problem. And I’m just going to say it like on the new manager playbook, I’m not going to say the solution is just to replace everybody with AI because it’s cheaper.
Like I’m not going to say it. I don’t agree with that. I don’t believe that. So that’s not what we’re talking about. If the problem trying to solve is exclusively saving money, that’s really not what this shows about. This is about how you be the best leader and the best manager. So I don’t know, you know, that’s for a different conversation. If your challenge is productivity, is high turnover, is low output, those are things that cost a lot of money.
Well, then those are things to dive into, right? High turnover is a very expensive problem that is not solved by just having AI, right? Replace jobs. If you want to have quality people and you have a turnover problem, there’s probably a culture issue. There might be a psychological safety issue. There might be a lack of clarity around, well, how do I advance here? What am I even doing? Right. So that’s job, you know, role, role specificity and understanding job requirements and what performance success looks like.
Those are all things that reduce turnover recognition. We talk about it on the show. Those are things that will solve the turnover problem. So even looking, if your goal is cost cutting, savings, that all that stuff, and you’re thinking automation is the full solution, it still isn’t, right? So that’s the discernment again, we want to be bringing in to the fold as leaders. Okay. So your question to be armed with every day with everything is to think about what problem am I trying to solve or what problems exist within my team, within my organization, do a little root cause analysis, and then decide, okay, is this a skills competencies thing?
We want to get some leadership training in here. Is this an automation use case that we just find requirements and we make sure we have our tools to really be able to communicate to the team, how we’re utilizing that. That’s part of the picture too, right? So it’s a two-part solution, but it’s the genesis is around what problems are we solving. When we ask that, we’re going to see, oh, wow, the solution isn’t AI full stop.
And that’s going to be a message to communicate back to our teams, asking them, hey, when you run into a snag, let’s look at it. Was it a miscommunication around expectations that we were not really clear on what success looks like? Do we agree to a timeline that really wasn’t feasible giving these external considerations? You’re going to empower your own team members as better problem solvers by thinking that way. And then that makes their jobs more future-proof too, so that they can take that critical thinking.
Because if we’re not bringing critical thinking, then we’re not bringing that human lens to the work enough. So this is a skill we’re going to need more than ever. And you can start by modeling it as a leader. All right. See you next time. Bye-bye.
Questions this episode answers
How do I know if AI will actually help my team or just create more problems?
Start by identifying the specific problem you are trying to solve before looking at any tool. If your team struggles with information not cascading down the org, or pulling research and data together, those are strong use cases for AI. But if the real problem is unclear expectations, low morale, or high turnover, AI is not the fix. The mistake most leaders make is jumping at a solution before diagnosing the breakdown. Get clear on the problem first, and the right solution, whether that is a tool, a skill, or a conversation, will become obvious.
What are the best use cases for AI on a small team?
The strongest use cases are the ones where something genuinely was not getting done before. Meeting notes are a perfect example: nobody wanted to take them, information was getting lost, and AI tools like Fathom or Otter solve that cleanly. Research and data aggregation is another one, where AI can surface information faster so your team member can focus on the actual analysis. Cascading decisions and strategy down through multiple levels of an organization is also a real gap that AI can help bridge. These are problems that existed before and were never fully solved.
Why is my team so resistant to AI tools even when the changes seem reasonable?
Resistance to AI almost always comes from fear of job loss, not disagreement with the tool itself. The broader narrative right now is that AI replaces people, so when team members hear the word AI, they immediately assume their role is next. As a leader, you have to name that fear directly and communicate clearly what problem you are solving and why their role matters in that picture. Skipping that conversation and expecting people to just get on board will make the resistance worse, not better.
Should I replace team members with AI tools to cut costs?
Replacing people with AI to save money before fixing your underlying systems is doing things out of order and will likely make things worse. If your team has gaps around decision communication, information flow, or unclear expectations, those gaps still exist after you reduce headcount, and now you have fewer people to catch the problems. High turnover, low output, and productivity issues are expensive problems, but they are usually caused by culture, lack of clarity, or missing leadership skills. Those are not solved by automation. Fix the system first, then layer in tools where they genuinely help.
What questions should I ask before buying a new AI or automation tool for my business?
Ask yourself: what specific problem am I trying to solve? Then do a quick root cause look at whether that problem is a skills and training issue, a communication breakdown, or a workflow gap that a tool could actually close. If you cannot name the problem clearly, the tool will not help. Leaders who skip this step end up with new software that causes confusion, slows things down, and costs more than expected. The most powerful thing you can do before signing up for any new platform is to diagnose what is actually breaking on your team right now.