#89 | Why AI Is Exposing the Leadership Gap and What Every Smart Leader Needs To Do Right Now To Secure Their Influence

Are you worried that AI could replace your job, or wondering what makes some people more valuable while others become easier to replace?

As AI rapidly changes the workplace, many professionals are focusing on learning new tools, earning certifications, and proving they're adaptable. But there’s a critical factor that most people overlook. The real differentiator isn't how well you use AI; it's how effectively you apply judgment. In this episode, you'll discover why some professionals are becoming more indispensable as AI adoption grows and how you can strengthen your own job security.

You'll discover:

1. The specific parts of your role AI can automate (and the parts it simply cannot replace).
2. Why making your judgment visible is more valuable than producing more output.
3. A simple framework for increasing your job security by highlighting the expertise, context, and decision-making that only humans can provide.

If you want to stay relevant, valuable, and difficult to replace in an AI-powered workplace, this episode will show you exactly where to focus your attention.

New episodes are released every Monday, Wednesday and Friday mornings.

Stuck, simmering, or onto something juicy? I want to hear it. Drop me a line at caroline@inspireyourgenius.com - I read them all.

And here is the Spotify Playlist to accompany UnShakeable Her.

This podcast explores what it really means to lead with confidence in systems that weren't built for you - tackling resilience, imposter syndrome, and credibility while unpacking how boundaries, conflict, and feedback shape the way women in leadership handle pressure, influence, and workplace politics. It also looks at strategic thinking, promotion, decision-making, and visibility, offering honest conversations about how to grow as a leader without losing yourself.

Transcript

Caroline Esterson (00:15.094)

AI Sorry, that was probably a bit loud. Eek! AI is coming for your job. Or is it?

Today we are going into that question. The one you might have searched on Google or asked ChatGPT about at 11 o'clock at night, just before your head hits the pillow. The one that's been sitting in the back of your mind since the last department meeting, where someone put up a slide with a robot on it and said, Exciting times. Is AI going to replace me? So by the end of today's episode, you're going to understand exactly.

which parts of your job AI can replace, and most importantly, which part it absolutely can't. You're going to see the trap that's catching brilliant people out right now, even the ones doing most things right. And you're going to meet a woman who figured out the one move that changed everything before anyone else in her building had even asked the right question. Let's get into it. Now here's what I want to say right up front.

The fear is not irrational. I'm not going to pat you on the head and say, don't worry, AI can never replace a human. That's not true, and you deserve better than that. But let's just take a look at a bit of the hype around AI. So back in 2023, IBM announced its pause hiring on around 7,800 back office roles because AI was going to absorb them.

Klarna replaced 700 customer service workers with AI and announced it very publicly. Goldman Sachs published research suggesting 300 million jobs globally are exposed to automation. 

Caroline Esterson (02:10.54)

Meanwhile, the IMF predicted that forty percent of global emplo Meanwhile, the IMF predicted that forty percent of global employment was in AI's crosshairs. These aren't fringe predictions, are they? These are serious institutions saying something significant is shifting. The anxiety made complete sense. But here's what the headlines didn't tell you. IBM's replacement happened slowly, patchily, and

Far less completely than the announcement implied. And Klarna, well, by 2026 this year, they were quietly hiring their customer service people back because AI handled the easy stuff absolutely fine. But it just fell apart the moment a real human problem walked in the door, which tells you something really important. The threat is real, the stats hold.

But the idea that AI was going to sweep through organizations overnight and leave a trail of empty desks, that hasn't happened. The shift is real and it's in motion, and yet it's far more complicated, more gradual, and more specific than the panic says.

And you know what, when something is complicated, gradual and specific? Well, that's actually useful to us, isn't it? Because it means there's still time to make a move. We haven't got infinite time, obviously. We can't relax and think it'll all be fine. But there is a window between where things are now and where they're heading. That window is what today is all about. Not about reassurance, but about a map.

So, yes, the fear makes perfect sense. Anyone who tells you otherwise is just not paying attention, or maybe more cynically, has something to gain from you not paying attention. But here's the thing about fear it's incredibly useful for getting you to notice a threat. It is almost entirely useless for helping you to figure out what to do about it. And right now, most of the AI conversation is running on pure fear.

Caroline Esterson (04:20.61)

Which means most people are either pretending they're confident when they're not, or quietly catastrophizing at 11 o'clock at night. Neither of these is a strategy. So here's what I also want you to know: some people are coming out of this moment more visible, more valued, and more unshakable than they went in. And it's not who you'd expect. It's not the ones with the AI certifications on their LinkedIn or the ones who've created their own prompts.

It's the ones who figured out one specific thing and made a small, deliberate move around that thing. That's exactly what today's story is about. So let me tell you about Justine. Justine is a senior content and comms manager, eight years at the same B2B company, sharp, thorough, the kind of person who holds the brand voice in her head so completely that she can read a piece of copy and know in 30 seconds that

Whether it sounds like them or not. Not because she's been trained to, just because she's paid that much attention for that long. She didn't think of that as a skill, by the way, she just thought of it as her job. One Tuesday afternoon in May, she gets called in

One Tuesday afternoon in May, she gets called into a meeting, and the head of marketing stands up and announces they're rolling out an AI content platform. From now on, the first draft for everything, socials, emails, web copy, thought leadership. Well, it now comes from the tool. The team's job, he says, shifts overnight. The team's job, he says, shifts to oversight and quality. Justine looked around the room.

Two colleagues are nodding so enthusiastic, they're practically levitating.

Caroline Esterson (06:13.474)

Justine looks around the room. Two colleagues are nodding so enthusiastically, they're practically levitating. One of them is already composing a LinkedIn post on his phone. Two others are very still. One is examining her notepad with forensic focus. And Justine is doing something else entirely. She's watching, reading the room, and she's thinking something that nobody else in that meeting is thinking.

The tool doesn't know that our MD hates the word leverage. It doesn't know we nearly lost our biggest client last year because the tone of one campaign was too salesy and it felt wrong to him. It doesn't know what good sounds like for us. And it doesn't know what we've learned the hard way. Right. Here's what Justine does not do. She doesn't raise a hand and says, I've got some concerns.

She doesn't send a passive aggressive email to her teen saying, excited about our new AI. She doesn't send a passive aggressive email to her team saying, ooh, excited about our new AI overlords. Can't wait to see what this means for all of us with a smiley face that does a lot of heavy lifting. She doesn't write a LinkedIn post about the importance of human creativity. She doesn't sign up for an open. She doesn't sign up for an AI certification to prove she's keeping up.

She goes home, opens a laptop, and writes a document. She calls it What Good Looks Like, our brand voice standards. Two pages, it's not clever or complicated. It's just everything that lived in her head, finally on paper. The words they never use, the tone that works for difficult news, the references that land with long term clients versus new ones, things that make their comms feel like them and not like anyone else. 

She sends it to the MD next morning with one line. Thought this might be useful as we embed the new tools. The MD replies in 11 minutes, this is exactly what we've been missing. Can you be the quality gate for all AI content before it goes out? Let that sit for a second. Justine didn't fight the technology. She didn't smile and nod away through it. She didn't pivot to become a prompt engineer or an AI strategist or whatever the title of the week is. She just asked one question.

Caroline Esterson (08:39.15)

Quietly, privately, before anyone else did. What does this tool still need a human for? And the answer: well, the answer was simple: judgment, taste, the ability to say, this is wrong, and here's exactly why. Fast forward six months, and Justine is head of brand. She is the person every piece of content runs through.

She's no longer the person who makes things. She's the person who decides whether the things are good enough to exist. Two of the Laddest Day I cheerleaders from that May meeting, poof, they're gone. Their roles were restructured. Now, I want to be really clear about what Justine actually did because it's easy to hear this story and think, she was strategic and feel vaguely guilty that you haven't been strategic enough. That's not what happened.

But first, can we just name what most people do in this moment? Because I think we need to say it out loud. The meeting ends, you walk back to your desk, and before you even sat down, your brain has gone somewhere very specific. The mortgage, the car payment, the kids' clubs, the holiday you've half booked, the subscription you keep meaning to cancel but haven't, all of it lines up immediately like a queue of very anxious creditors, and suddenly you're not thinking about your job at all.

You're thinking about everything your job pays for. And when your brain is doing that, when it's running full speed through worst case financial scenarios, it can't also be solving the actual problem. The dread takes up the whole room. There's no space left for anything useful. Justine didn't do that. Not because she's wired differently, or because she doesn't have a mortgage or commitments or things she was quietly paying for every moment.

But because she did something, she took some action before the dread could actually land. She asked one question. What does this tool still need a human for? That's it. One question. Ask quietly before the part That's it. One question. Ask quietly before the spiral could start. And that question led to two pages. Two pages led to one email. And one email, well, it changed everything.

Caroline Esterson (11:01.496)

Justine made one two millimeter shift in how she understood her own value. She stopped thinking of herself as the person who makes things. She became the person who judges things. That's the entire move right there. Two millimeters of reframe. And here's why it matters. AI can produce, it can generate, draft, iterate, output of volume and a speed. Whoa, no human can match.

your output, the thing that you make, the deliverable, and I can probably replicate something close to that, not perfectly, not with your knowledge or your taste, but close enough to make you nervous if your job is defined by what you produce. Your judgment though, well, it just can't touch that. Your judgment is the thing that says, that's subtly off brand and here's why. That's going to land badly with this particular client.

That's technically correct and entirely wrong for this moment. AI doesn't know what it doesn't know. You do. The problem, the real problem, the one that's actually catching people out is this. Most people have made their output visible and keep their judgment invisible. Their job looks like deliverables. It looks like what they make. So when the tool starts making things too, they just look replaceable.

Justine just fixed that. She put her judgment on paper, she made the invisible visible, and she sent it to the person who needed to see it. Two pages, one email, one morning. That's the two millimeter difference.

Caroline Esterson (12:44.63)

Right, time for the unspoken rule book where we name the rule nobody saying out loud, because once you see it, you just can't unsee it. And this week's rule is be enthusiastic about AI. Even if you're terrified, even if you have no idea what it means for your job, the visible cheerleaders get promoted, anyone who looks threatened, well, they get optimised. I bet you felt this, haven't you? The pressure to be excited about a technology that might be actively coming for your role.

Put AI enthusiast in your bio even, to post about how you've embraced the change, to be visibly, loudly, LinkedIn officially at peace with a thing that's actually keeping you up at night. Because the alternative, well, it's about being that person who struggles with change. And in a restructure, that label goes on a list and it stays there. So everyone performs.

The performance becomes a competition. Who can be first? Who could be loudest? Who could be most visible enthusiastically AI forward before anyone else in the building? But here's what nobody tells you about where that competition ends. The people performing this pretence the hardest are actually often the first to go. Because somewhere in all that enthusiasm, they made a mistake. Their entire visible value became I'm good at using this tool. And guess what is also good at using this tool?

The tool. The people who survive restructures, who come out the other side with more responsibility, not less, possibly even with the promotion, are the ones who got quiet, specific, who stopped asking, how do I look unafraid? And started asking, what do I actually do here? That the tool just can't. Now there's a word for what Justine did, and it isn't strategy, it's positioning.

And I want you to understand the difference between those two things because it matters enormously right now.

Caroline Esterson (14:50.794)

Strategy is a bit of a performance. It says, look how enthusiastic I am, how adaptable, look how fine I am with all of this. Positioning, on the other hand, well, positioning says, let me show you specifically with evidence what I can see that the tool can't, what I know that the tool doesn't, what happens to the output when I'm not the person checking it. Strategy is loud and temporary.

Positioning is quiet and sticky. The unspoken rule tells you to perform. Every instinct for self-preservation says, be the AI cheerleader, be the visible one, be the one who looks fine.

Break that rule, get specific, get quiet, get visible in the right way about the right thing. Justine didn't strategize or perform, she positioned herself. Two pages, one email, that's all it took. So here's what I want to leave you with today. AI is not the problem. The way most of us have been defining our value by what we produce, what we deliver and what we make, that's the problem.

And it was always the problem. AI just made it impossible to ignore. Your output, well, AI can approximate it. Get close enough to make you nervous if that's all you're showing people. Your judgments, now that's a completely different story. Your taste, your read, your ability to say this is wrong and here's exactly why. AI just can't touch that, not even close. But judgment only protects you if people can see it

If it's still living in your head, unwritten, unnamed, and unreferenced, it doesn't exist professionally. It's invisible, and invisible things don't survive restructures. Justine's move wasn't complicated, wasn't expensive. It didn't require a course certification or a complete reinvention of who she is. She took two hours and wrote down what she knew, then sent it to one person.

Caroline Esterson (17:00.044)

And she went from the person most likely to be evolved out to the person they couldn't afford to lose. So here's your question for this week. Not next month, this week, right now. What do I know? Really know from experience, from watching, from getting things wrong and learning that the tool doesn't. Write it down. Wherever you are right now, just get it out of your head and onto something someone else could read.

Because you know what? The woman who comes out at this moment unshakeable, well, they're not the ones who were the loudest about AI. They're the ones who knew what they were worth and made sure someone else could see it too.

Caroline Esterson (17:47.351)

So today we understood exactly which parts of your job AI can replace and which parts it absolutely can't. Your judgment and your sense making skills. You went on to see the trap that's catching brilliant people out right now, even the ones doing a lot of things right. They're performing around AI. The ones who have this nailed, well, they're the ones who are thinking about their positioning.

thinking about how to maximize the use of the tool and leverage these innate

Caroline Esterson (18:27.628)

You saw the trap that's catching brilliant people out right now. Even the ones do most things right. They're performing around AI. The ones who have this nailed are the ones who are thinking about how to maximize the use of the tool and leveraging their innate human skills, those ones that you absolutely can't replicate. And you met Justine, a woman who figured out the one move that changed everything before anyone else in the building had even asked a question.

That question was what can't AI do that I can? And she based her work on that gap and got a promotion for it.

So that's loop for today. And on Wednesday, we go into the science because what Justine did on instincts, well, there's actual research behind it. We're looking at which skills become more valuable when AI is everywhere and a pattern playing out across industries right now that almost nobody in your organization is talking about openly. Because just believing yourself is not a strategy. Understanding what's actually happening in your head and in your organization, well That absolutely is.