AI Is Making the Human Work Undeniable

Megan Robinson has spent years helping leaders learn what they were never taught. In the age of AI, her work reveals a critical truth: the future of work will depend on leadership, trust, and critical thinking as technology becomes table stakes.

Something is happening inside organizations right now, and most leaders are only seeing half of it. The half they can see is genuinely extraordinary: artificial intelligence is reshaping work at a pace nobody fully anticipated. The half they are missing is equally important, and far less discussed. The organizations capturing the most value from AI are not winning because of the technology. They are winning because of the people around it.

The data tells a sobering story. According to Deloitte Chief Technology Officer Bill Briggs, companies are currently pouring 93 percent of their AI budgets into technology and only 7 percent into the people expected to use it. What Briggs describes as obsessing over the “ingredients” while ignoring the “recipe” (1). The consequences are visible in the returns. Research from McKinsey finds that only about 6 percent of organizations are currently capturing significant value from AI, defined as a measurable impact of 5 percent or more on enterprise earnings (2). The ninety-four percent who aren’t capturing value, are not failing because of the tools. They are failing because of the gap between what those tools demand and what their organizations are prepared to give. Megan Robinson has been watching that gap form for years, from inside boardrooms, coaching sessions, and leadership programs across more than a hundred organizations. What she sees coming is not a crisis. It is an invitation.

The Problem She Felt First

That imbalance is not new, and it did not arrive with AI. Robinson has been watching an older, quieter version of it play out for decades, across thousands of hours inside organizations of every size and sector. Not on the technology side. On the human side. The pattern of placing people into demanding new roles, assuming they will figure it out, and investing very little in helping them get there. She knows this not because she studied it. She lived it.

She is the founder of E Leader Experience, a leadership development firm whose team brings experience supporting organizations including Fortune 500 companies.. Her firm’s Coaching First Approach™ rejects passive training in favor of something more demanding: real coaching, real organizational challenges, real behavior change.

She built the firm around a problem she had felt herself. As a high-performing individual contributor thrown suddenly into leadership, she found herself responsible for the human beings around her rather than just the outputs. “I was definitely that person,” she says. “And my personality style was not exactly the most empathetic one. Business is business, personal is personal.” She pauses. “That doesn’t last long.”

What she discovered, and what she has spent the years since trying to teach, is that the gap between great individual contributor and great leader is not a skills gap in the traditional sense. It is an emotional one. It is about learning to name things. To sit with discomfort. To address what is quietly festering before it becomes a fire. The transition from executing to leading is one of the hardest things a professional ever does, and over the last few decades organizations have steadily downsized the structures and training that were designed to build an exceptional practice of people management. The endless pursuit of better output and increased productivity are center stage and the development of critical thinking, people management and soft skills have taken a back seat.

The work of E Leader Experience involves getting into rooms with leadership teams and asking questions that reveal how little agreement exists at the top: What does great leadership actually look like here? What do you expect from your managers? What are they supposed to model for their teams? The conversations, she says, are almost always illuminating, frequently uncomfortable, and surprisingly rare.

“People don’t know what’s expected of them,” she says. “And when you don’t know what’s expected of you, you can’t lean into it. You default to what you know, which is usually the technical work you came from.” The lack of clear expectations, she has found, runs in both directions. The new manager who doesn’t know what their role requires, and who then fails to communicate what they expect from their own team. It is not a symptom of poor management. It is the root. The place where almost every organizational breakdown she encounters quietly begins.

It is also, as it happens, a similar experience is playing out with AI. Most organizations are deploying the technology without ever clearly defining what they expect from it, or from the people being asked to use it — promoting everyone, in effect, into a new kind of role without explaining what the job is.

She had been saying this for years before AI entered the conversation. The problem she was solving was older than the technology, quieter, and in most organizations, easy enough to defer. Then something changed. Not the nature of the problem, but the cost of ignoring it.

The Amplifier

“I call AI an amplifier,” she says.

The metaphor carries weight coming from someone who has watched organizations, up close, at the precise moment things begin to unravel. COVID didn’t create fragile businesses. It revealed them. AI, Robinson argues, is doing the same thing to companies and that is not entirely bad news. “If something was broken before,” she says, “AI is going to just amplify it and bring it to light”. The breaking, in her view, is the beginning. It is the moment a company finally has to look at what it has been quietly ignoring.

What tends to surface is a consistent set of gaps. Mid-level managers who were already struggling to lead people, not just manage tasks, find their roles hollowed out as companies rush to automate. HR teams are eliminated on the reasoning that AI can handle the administrative burden, before anyone has reckoned with the fact that most of what good HR actually does is profoundly, irreducibly human. Problems don’t get solved. They migrate upward, landing on the desks of executives who are already stretched, already spending an outsized proportion of their time in firefighting mode, reacting to crises rather than building toward anything. “I’ve seen entire HR teams wiped out because leadership decided AI could replace what they were doing,” she says. “They were sorely wrong.” The capabilities AI cannot replicate, she argues, are precisely the ones organizations have been under-investing in for years.

At the top of that list is critical thinking — the ability to question, evaluate, and push back rather than simply accept what a system produces. Emerging research is beginning to quantify what is at stake. A 2025 preprint from MIT’s Media Lab used EEG to monitor the brain activity of 54 participants across multiple writing sessions and found that those who used ChatGPT showed significantly weaker neural connectivity than those who worked without it — patterns that persisted even after AI use stopped (3). The researchers described the long-term effect as “cognitive debt”: the idea that sustained over-reliance on AI may erode the capacity for independent thought over time. A separate study, peer-reviewed and published in the proceedings of the 2025 ACM CHI Conference, surveyed 319 knowledge workers and found that higher confidence in AI tools directly correlated with less critical thinking effort (4). The researchers warned that by mechanizing routine cognitive tasks, organizations risk leaving workers’ judgment, what they called their “cognitive musculature”, atrophied and thus less prepared for the moments that actually require it.

Robinson has been watching this play out inside organizations long before the research caught up. “AI is only going to amplify the difference between who can think critically and who cannot,” she says. “If organizations haven’t invested in that skill, they are about to feel exactly what that gap costs them.”

The Invitation

For Robinson, all of it comes back to the same question. Not whether to use AI, not which tools to adopt, not how quickly to automate. But what a company actually believes about the people who work there, and what it has done to act on that belief.

For most organizations, the honest answer is: not enough. The gap between what great leadership requires and what companies have actually invested in building has been widening for decades. The journey from technical expert to effective leader is one of the hardest transitions in professional life and one of the least supported. Critical thinking gets listed as a desired attribute and rarely built in practice. The assumption that leaders will know how to lead without much investment or guidance has quietly become standard. Most of them don’t.

AI has not created this gap. It has simply made the cost of it visible.

What Robinson has watched, across boardrooms and coaching sessions in organization after organization, is the same collision: sophisticated technology landing on a human foundation that was never quite solid. Teams accepting AI outputs without questioning them. Leaders unable to bring their people through the change. Executives absorb problems that should have been resolved two levels below, losing bandwidth for the work that actually requires their judgment. The tool is not the issue. The infrastructure around it is.

Robinson sees this moment as an invitation, not a warning. The companies that respond to this as a technology challenge will keep cycling through tools. The ones that respond as a human challenge, that finally invest in leadership development, critical thinking, and the genuine connection AI will never supply, those are the companies that build something durable.

They will not pull ahead because they found a better algorithm. They will pull ahead because they built what the algorithm cannot replicate: people who know how to lead, and an organization wise enough to trust them.

That is the formula. It has always been the formula. The age of AI is simply making it undeniable.

Megan Robinson is the founder of E Leader Experience, a leadership development firm that has served more than 100 organizations across seven countries. This conversation is part of the Humans & AI: Founder Series by HumanCulture.

Sources:

1. Lichtenberg, N. (2025, December 15). Deloitte’s CTO on a stunning AI transformation stat: Companies are spending 93% on tech and only 7% on people. Fortune. https://fortune.com/2025/12/15/deloitte-cto-bill-briggs-what-really-scares-ceos-about-ai-human-resources/

2. Singla, A., Sukharevsky, A., Yee, L., Chui, M., & Hall, B. (2025, November 5). The state of AI in 2025: Agents, innovation, and transformation. McKinsey & Company. https://www.mckinsey.com/capabilities/quantumblack/our-insights/the-state-of-ai

3. Kos’myna, N., Hauptmann, E., Yuan, Y. T., Situ, J., Liao, X.-H., Beresnitzky, A. V., Braunstein, I., & Maes, P. (2025). Your brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of cognitive debt when using an AI assistant for essay writing task. arXiv preprint arXiv:2506.08872. https://www.media.mit.edu/publications/your-brain-on-chatgpt/

4. Lee, H.-P., et al. (2025). The impact of generative AI on critical thinking: Self-reported reductions in cognitive effort and confidence effects from a survey of knowledge workers. In Proceedings of the 2025 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (CHI ‘25). ACM. https://dl.acm.org/doi/full/10.1145/3706598.3713778