AI-Positive vs AI-Negative: A New Lens on Leadership

How Leaders View AI Exposes What They Really Think About Their Team

Before we go any further, I should tell you the title probably doesn’t mean what you think it means. This article isn’t about AI itself; it’s about what leadership’s view of AI reveals about leadership’s view of people.

I must admit I’m disheartened by leaders who view AI as a quick path to increased revenue and profit without considering its impact on people outside the leadership team. Frankly, it’s shameful. We’ve all heard the stories and seen the posts about how AI is going to replace certain roles. Writers, musicians, artists, software developers, and many others are often viewed as less than necessary by some and even as a completely replaceable scourge by others. I doubt that we will navigate this without some being displaced by AI, but it’s the wholesale view of replaceability that’s misguided. On the other hand, I'm encouraged by the many leaders out there who are getting this right.

It’s interesting to note that, in reality, some leadership roles could be more easily replaced by AI. AI can weigh all the inputs, analyze markets, prioritize the most impactful elements of an offering, make decisions, and delegate tasks efficiently. But you might not hear that from many C-level execs.

I think we all understand that AI is bringing significant change to the world, and, for better or worse, the cat is out of the bag. I still believe that AI holds great promise, and we must be thoughtful not only about how it is used but, more importantly, how it is framed from a leadership perspective.

AI is a product of a technological society, and people can leverage it to position themselves in a superior way, exploit it for profit, and push aside those they believe are no longer necessary. It can also be viewed as the greatest opportunity for post-inventive integration, essentially rethinking how we can coexist or co-thrive with one of the most transformative technologies the world has ever seen.

To bring more clarity to these contrasting leadership styles, I began defining what I call AI-negative and AI-positive approaches.

AI-Positive vs AI-Negative in a Nutshell

When leadership views AI as a means to extend efficiencies to customers and undertakes the hard work of rethinking how the existing team can function more effectively using AI as a tool, thereby opening up opportunities to leverage the team’s knowledge of the business and market, that leadership is AI-positive (AI+).

When leadership primarily views AI as a means to replace people and as a vehicle to accomplish tasks more quickly while charging more for the same experience under the banner of AI, that leadership is AI-negative (AI-).

Ultimately, it comes down to whether you consider the impact on your team and how their job responsibilities may change when using AI. In other words, how can you continue to leverage their detailed knowledge of the company to provide more creative thinking on how the company delivers products and services to its customers?

Having spent most of my life in the tech world, I’ve seen both the incredible leadership and disturbing toxicity firsthand. Ultimately, I’ve been able to navigate around and through toxicity because I love working with technology and people to achieve meaningful and impactful things.

However, I’ve worked with a few leaders who view those outside the inner circle as useful pawns, employed only to perform a task, treated like line items on a spreadsheet, and disposable, with an action as simple as right-clicking and deleting. With the promise of great wealth, many are lured into tech companies by charismatic leaders, only to be burned out, tossed aside, and forgotten. And when the stories of these innovative companies are told, we extol the virtues of the frequently maniacal, sociopathic, and cultish leaders, putting them on the covers of books and making movies about them while ignoring those who were lured in and used as fodder to put them on a pedestal.

I’m not naive enough to think that there is never a time to reduce the workforce, but it’s long overdue for the “AI will replace everyone but me” rhetoric to be dialed back a notch or twenty. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not talking about every tech company. I would have left the tech world long ago if I didn’t believe more good has come from tech than bad. But it is time for us to speak up and be heard about the dangers of a top-down-only worldview, coupled with an arrogant confidence based on the promise of AI making people even easier to dispose of than a row on a spreadsheet.

Leaders who see AI as the primary value driver have already missed what matters most: people. People created AI. Every bit of output from an AI model is based on the creative work and data produced by others, which is used to train the model to reproduce patterns inherent in that data. People are the source of AI, and those who ignore this fact in the name of opportunity are short-sighted and ignorant of their own humanity. Outside of the incredible speed with which models can provide generation and synthesis, the most profound innovations still currently come from people.

Real World Examples

An AI-negative Case: In 2024, buy-now-pay-later company Klarna dismissed approximately 700 customer service employees and replaced them with an AI assistant developed in collaboration with AI. After handling roughly 2.3 million customer service conversations, customer satisfaction declined due to the AI assistant’s inability to effectively address complex or sensitive issues. Klarna’s CEO eventually admitted that the approach was a mistake and began rehiring people to restore the quality of customer interactions.

An AI-positive Case: Western Rise, a travel apparel brand, faced challenges related to handling customer interactions at scale. Instead of replacing their customer service team, an AI customer service agent was integrated into the process to handle routine inquiries, reducing average response times from 20 hours to 36 seconds and achieving a 98% customer satisfaction rating. This allowed the customer service team to focus on more complex tasks, which transformed their impact on the business and increased overall team morale.

What Responsible, Forward-Looking Leadership Should Strive For

So, what should we expect of ourselves as leaders and of our leadership when it comes to AI? Here are my top 10 traits of an AI+ company:

1. Collaborating with employees, encouraging them to suggest how their jobs might be altered or enhanced by AI in a non-threatening way.

2. Determining how employees can be retrained or upskilled to creatively use the gaps that AI has created in their jobs.

3. Developing a quiet confidence about how the company will implement AI and taking strides to make it real.

4. Acting counter to the hype cycle and talking to your customers about how AI integration in the company’s products and services would best help them.

5. Not viewing AI as a route to dispose of people, but as a route to removing repetitive task-oriented work and empowering more creative thought at every level.

6. Asking employees at every level what they think about AI, how it might help them if they are afraid of AI, and how you can help them learn more about AI.

7. Educating your employees on AI, providing them with access, and enabling them to safely experiment with it.

8. Communicating early and often about how the leadership team views AI and how it is expected to impact the company and the market.

9. Holding AI town halls where anonymous questions are submitted and answered by leadership.

10. Encouraging people to offer ideas, no matter how radical or uncomfortable, about how the company, its products, and its internal roles may change as a result of AI.

The more of these practices are followed, the more AI+ your point of view, and the more value you will ultimately receive from AI and your team.

Which kind of leader will you choose to be, one who only looks to replace people or one who strives to elevate them?

Key TakeAways

• The bottom line is that AI is the culmination of human ingenuity, skills, and creativity. Pretending those very things are disposable because of advanced models is incredibly presumptuous and naive. Perhaps even bordering on cruel.

• The best leaders will approach AI as a means to eliminate the drudgery of repetitive tasks and foster creativity at all levels, enabling everyone to be more human, more creative, and less robotic.

• Poor leaders will continue to prioritize how they can eliminate people as a benefit of AI. They will replace humans with machines built by their very efforts and creativity, and often have to backpedal on those decisions.