Our recent conversation on AI and leadership led to a re-frame that just might help you cut through the AI noise and overwhelm.
Megan Barbier, CHRO at Exactly Corp and WW Exec Member, said it almost offhandedly — but it landed with the weight of something much bigger: "Are we really in an AI transformation? Or are we actually in the age of humanity?"
Her point was this. The tactical work — the reconciliation, the double-checking, the coordination tasks, the menial and repetitive — AI can do that. It's doing it now. Which means what's left for the humans in the room is the work that has always mattered most and has always been hardest to carve out time for.
The high-level thinking. The judgment calls. The trust-building. The relationships. The empathy and context that no agent can replicate.
She called it graduating from ‘human in the loop’ to ‘human on the loop’.
Because if AI is taking the work we were never meant to do indefinitely — the grinding, repeating, checking — then what it's really doing is calling us to a higher purpose. Asking us to show up more fully as leaders. To be more present, more vulnerable, more human with the people we serve. To be stewards of principles and intellectual thought.
Now, that doesn't erase the anxiety or the work that is on our plate each Monday morning. The speed of change is real. The disruption is real. But Megan's question reorients it: from what are we losing to what are we finally being freed to do?
If this is the age of humanity, the most important thing you can bring to work right now isn't technical fluency. It's you.
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This email was inspired by a recent conversation with Megan Barbier on a recent Wednesday Women online event: Integrating AI at the Executive Level - you can watch the full event replay here.
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