Nick Jankel: How To Harness AI to Accelerate Career Success & Avoid Being Made Obsolete
Guest article by futurist and AI speaker Nick Jankel:
Over the past three decades, I’ve worked at the intersection of technology, innovation, and leadership, helping organizations—from Fortune 500s to ambitious startups to fast-growth scale-ups—navigate and capitalize on disruption.
As a leadership keynote speaker, innovation strategist, and AI futurist, I’ve guided senior teams through every major technological wave, from the dot-com boom and Web 2.0 to the current rise of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning.
AI is the most powerful and unpredictable wave yet. With its extraordinary capacity for analysis, pattern detection, and automation, AI can dramatically improve performance, productivity, and profitability across industries. But it can also expose leadership blind spots and make once-valuable skills obsolete.
Since 1997, I’ve seen every new technology arrive with promises of exponential growth and efficiency, and witnessed countless leaders and companies fail to translate that potential into real-world results (even in technology companies like Nokia and RIM).
My career has been about bridging this gap: helping leaders use emerging technologies not as shiny distractions to fit the buzzword moment, but as catalysts for purposeful growth, customer-centric creativity, leadership transformation, and meaningful culture change.
Having explored both machine intelligence and human performance for decades, I’ve found that the leaders who thrive in this new era are those who learn to collaborate with AI: guiding, challenging, and leveraging it to amplify their own creativity, insight, and strategic impact.
The leaders who resist, over-promise, or defer to AI risk being outpaced not just by competitors, but by the technology itself.
Where AI Succeeds and Humans Fail
It’s vital to understand the genius and limitations of AI—and how they compare to those of human beings, even high-achieving ones like those reading this.
Where AI is clearly succeeding is in analysis. Frontier LLMs synthesize vast amounts of information, connect disparate datasets, detect subtle patterns, and make predictive suggestions in seconds. This is work that takes human beings days.
In healthcare, for example, AI assistants can boost detection accuracy and consistency, freeing clinicians for higher-value tasks. Freed from human fatigue, cleaned of bias, and devoid of emotional needs, AI, especially agentic AI, will be able to chug along 24/7/365 doing repetitive and analytical tasks.
As hallucinations decline and speed rises, the analytical realm will increasingly be “owned” by machines. If your value as a leader has been being the smartest person in the room, solving technical problems, and building the “best ever spreadsheet,” the competitive clock is ticking.
Where Leaders Are Being Outmatched by AI
The uncomfortable truth is that machines are outperforming many leaders at the very skills that once defined executive success: analysis, optimization, and problem-solving. If your edge has been intellect alone—solving technical problems or managing the perfect spreadsheet—AI will soon outpace you.
To stay relevant, leaders must pivot from analysis to synthesis, from being smart to being wise. Our value now lies in what AI cannot replicate: creativity, contextual judgment, empathy, and the capacity to make sense of complexity. These are the qualities that inspire teams, align organizations, and shape meaningful innovation.
Yet even these most “human” of traits are being simulated by AI with startling successes that have shocked me. Studies show that people often rate chatbot responses as more empathic than doctors’ replies, and LLMs are now generating research ideas judged more novel than those of human experts.
How Leaders Can Rise To The Challenge
The bar for successful transformational leadership has risen dramatically. It’s no longer enough to enact performative empathy, psychological safety, and innovation; leaders must embody empathy, model curiosity, and lead innovation through inevitable uncertainty and resistance.
AI remains brittle in crucial ways. AI’s brilliance is not matched by its infallibility. It still hallucinates, fabricates, and misleads, confidently producing false answers and flawed logic—from dangerous misdiagnoses to nonsense legal briefs.
Even sophisticated systems fail at basic math reasoning, misdiagnose complex problems, and generate what people now call “slop”: content that looks impressive but lacks depth, coherence, and truth.
Without human oversight, AI can amplify bias, automate mediocrity, and corrode trust. Confident-sounding outputs mask uncertainty and erode safety. Workslop—content that looks like good work but lacks validity and value—wastes time, harms culture, and diminishes the perceived capability and trustworthiness of those who create it.
This is where AI-ready leadership becomes essential.
Leaders must guide, challenge, and guardrail AI to ensure it serves their organization’s strategy, teams, and stakeholders rather than undermining them. The goal is not blind adoption but disciplined collaboration, using AI’s speed and scope to amplify, not replace, human intelligence, discernment, and wisdom.
The future belongs to those who can combine machine precision with human wisdom, what I call The LEADERSHIP-AI Synthesis.
How Leaders Can Harness Artificial Intelligence to Drive Meaningful Impact
The LEADERSHIP-AI Synthesis is a practical “middle way” that blends the best of human and machine capabilities.
AI is most powerful when guided and guard-railed by human leaders; people leadership is most potent when elevated and supported by AI.
In my keynotes on artificial intelligence, I go beyond the buzz and the basics to explore the complementary strengths between AI and people managers:
| Human Leadership Capabilities | Artificial Intelligence Capabilities |
| Provides guardrails, ethical guidance, and alignment — ensuring decisions serve purpose, values, and human wellbeing. | Delivers analysis without fatigue or bias, offering precision, consistency, and real-time insights. |
| Engages in critical, creative, and conceptual reframing to co-create next practices and innovative solutions. | Applies analytical, deductive, and rational thinking to solve technical problems through vast best-practice libraries. |
| Makes contextual sense of complexity, crafting shared understanding and interdependent meaning across systems. | Joins the dots across complicated datasets and knowledge fields, uncovering correlations humans might miss. |
| Cultivates collective intelligence, sets shared goals, and exhibits relational and executive presence. | Handles agentic goal-pursuit and automated task execution, scaling operational excellence. |
| Generates future-forging insights, intuitive discernment, and original co-creation. | Contributes data-driven predictions, ideation, and destruction testing, accelerating experimentation. |
| Holds vision and purpose, making complex, values-based, and long-term strategic decisions. | Supports multimodal forecasting, risk detection, and optimization, ensuring efficiency and adaptability. |
| Embodies care, empathy, and hope, inspiring trust and motivation in teams and communities. | Supplies encouragement, appreciation, and scalable support, reinforcing human effort through feedback loops. |
From Division of Labor to Collaboration On Excellence
This synthesis reframes the division of labor:
- AI handles the complicated; leaders engage with the complex.
- AI supplies information; leaders shape interpretation and meaning.
- AI suggests what is; leaders discern what ought to be.
- Machines process, leaders parse.
- Systems scale information, leaders scale inspiration.
Mastering this partnership is the path to becoming leaders deepened—not displaced—by technology.
The leaders and organizations that thrive will not out-analyze their competitors; they will out-create and narrate them. The work now is to elevate our consciousness and capabilities at the speed AI advances—so that, as artificial intelligence matures, human leadership and embodied wisdom develop even faster.
Then we can use AI to unlock exponential innovations and profound digital transformations.
Book AI speaker Nick Jankel for a lecture: nick.jankel@premium-speakers.com or 1 (704) 804 1054