What Are We Choosing to Hand Over?

As technology becomes capable of doing more on our behalf, an old leadership question is taking on new meaning.

It is difficult to follow the conversation about artificial intelligence today without encountering some degree of unease. The possibilities being described are extraordinary, but so are some of the questions about where these capabilities may lead. We naturally look to those closest to the technology for answers, yet many of those answers are still being worked out. That can make it difficult to know what deserves our confidence, what deserves our concern and what may simply require more time.

I have seen predictions that proved remarkably prescient and others that disappeared almost as quickly as they arrived. Often, the consequences that matter most become clearer only after people and organizations have begun living with the technology.

Recently, in the middle of one of these conversations, I was offered a small convenience. Rather than continuing to follow developments in AI myself, the technology could monitor them for me and bring something to my attention when it determined that it mattered. I declined, although I may make a different choice another time. What stayed with me was not the decision itself, but the fact that I had paused.

I was comfortable asking technology to find something for me or help me understand something when I chose to engage with it. I was less certain that I wanted it deciding, while I was doing something else, what deserved my attention. There was nothing particularly consequential about that choice. But it made me wonder how many versions of it are beginning to appear in our work and our lives.

For those of us who have worked around technology for a long time, delegation to machines is hardly new. Decades ago, organizations routinely left computers working through the night. Batch processes posted transactions, reconciled accounts, updated records, produced reports and identified exceptions for people to review the next morning. We have been deciding for a long time what technology should handle and when people should become involved.

What may be changing is the range of things we can ask technology to do on our behalf. Increasingly, we can give a system an objective and allow it some latitude in determining how to pursue it. That does not make everything happening today unprecedented. It does mean that some choices about where our involvement begins and ends may become less obvious than they once were.

There are many things I would gladly hand over. If technology can remove work that consumes attention without adding much value, there is little reason to preserve that work simply because people once performed it. But some choices feel different. Reconciling transactions is one thing. Deciding which customer deserves attention is another. Scheduling a conversation feels different from conducting one. Finding information I requested feels different, at least to me, from deciding which information I ought to see.

I don’t know exactly where the line belongs, and I suspect there isn’t one line. Leadership has always required us to decide what to remain close to and what to entrust to others. Anyone who has led a large organization knows that you cannot be involved in everything, nor should you be. Organizations depend on responsibility and judgment existing beyond any one person. Technology extends that familiar choice into places we may not have had reason to consider before.

Sometimes those choices reveal things that have little to do with technology itself. If an employee finds it easier to use AI to help express a difficult concern than to raise that concern directly with a manager, the technology may have provided something useful. But I would hope the manager might also wonder why the concern was difficult to raise in the first place. The technology did not create that question. It may simply have made it easier to see.

I think about this in more ordinary situations too. There are plenty of meetings I would happily replace with a good summary. Most executives probably would. Yet I have also been in conversations where what mattered was not what eventually appeared in the notes. It was a hesitation before someone answered, an unexpected question, or something that was never quite said. You do not always know beforehand which conversation will contain one of those moments.

That doesn’t make being present inherently better, and it doesn’t mean we should preserve human involvement for its own sake. Sometimes distance is useful. Sometimes direct involvement adds very little. But efficiency and proximity are not the same thing. As technology becomes more capable, deciding when each matters may increasingly be left to us.

Perhaps that is where some of the larger uncertainty around AI matters. There are questions about where these capabilities may lead that I cannot answer, and I am not sure anyone can answer them today with the confidence many of us would like. I don’t find that particularly reassuring, but neither do I think it leaves us powerless. We do not need to know the eventual destination of the technology before paying attention to the choices we are making with it now.

Many of those choices will become ordinary, just as earlier forms of automation did. We will stop thinking about some of them altogether, and that may be entirely appropriate. But familiarity has a way of making choices disappear into the way work simply gets done. Future leaders may inherit organizations in which decisions about human involvement were made years before they arrived and are no longer experienced as decisions at all.

My own small decision certainly did not reveal where some permanent boundary should be. I may eventually decide that having technology monitor developments for me is useful and wonder why I hesitated in the first place. What interested me was having the opportunity to notice the choice while it was still visible.

Maybe that is the practice worth holding onto as the technology changes. We can remain curious about what becomes possible without assuming that everything possible needs to become habitual. We can allow our boundaries to move as we learn and reconsider them when experience gives us a reason to. Leadership has always involved deciding what deserves our attention, what can safely move farther away and what is worth keeping close.

As AI becomes more capable, those decisions may become more frequent and less obvious. I don’t think we all need to make them the same way. I do think there is value in noticing that we are making them.

Reflection

As technology becomes capable of doing more on your behalf, which choices do you want to remain conscious of making yourself?