People aren't afraid of the dark. They're afraid of what's in the dark that they don't know.
That's where most leaders are sitting with AI right now. It's not the technology that's spooking them. It's the pace. Whatever you think is true about these tools today is going to be partly wrong two months from now. Something I tried three months ago that didn't work at all now works at a really high level. That's the new normal, and we have to learn how to lead inside of it.
I've been saying this a lot lately, and the more I say it, the more I'm convinced it's the right frame: the future isn't one road. It's two parallel roads at the same time. Highly autonomous AND deeply human. The leaders and the businesses that win in 2026 are the ones who double down on both, not one.
Most people are picking a lane. They're either all-in on automation and quietly hoping the human side takes care of itself, or they're scared of AI and digging in on "we've always done it this way." Both of those are losing positions. The winners are running both lanes hard.
The autonomous road
Let me start with the automation lane, because it's where the obvious leverage is.
In my agency, stuff that used to take four people in four weeks can now be done in an afternoon with one person. That's not a future projection. That's last Tuesday. The implication for how a business is structured, priced, and led is enormous, and most owners haven't caught up to it yet.
Six or seven years ago, before any of this AI conversation existed, I made a call inside my agency. I decided I wanted our internal team to be leaders, managers, and strategists. Not producers. So we shifted a lot of the production work outside the building. The reason I did that was I thought the global commoditization of labor was going to drive production costs down to near zero. I wanted to get ahead of it and free our team up to think bigger.
Then AI showed up. And here's what's interesting: AI slotted right into that production layer. The work that used to live outside the building now gets a heavy assist from AI, and the team gets pulled up into bigger work - more strategy, more client judgment, more creative direction. The structure I built for one reason ended up being the right structure for a completely different reason. Same team. More leverage. Bigger ideas going out the door.
That's the whole point. AI is the production layer. The team is the judgment layer. They compound. Multiplied impact, not subtraction.
I don't tell that story to brag about the call. I tell it because it points at the real shift happening to every services business right now. The middle manager role - the layer that exists mainly to coordinate production - is going to get real mushy, real soon. More and more of the value will come from people who are direct individual contributors with judgment, or from leaders who can compose AI plus a strong team into outcomes that used to be out of reach. The middle isn't getting cut. It's getting elevated.
That is the autonomous road. It's real, it's here, and pretending otherwise is going to cost you.
The deeply human road
Now here's what almost nobody is saying out loud.
The same shift that's making the autonomous road faster is making the human road more valuable, not less. The more AI does, the more the in-person, eye-to-eye, room-temperature stuff matters.
I'm telling our team we need to actually go back to the old school stuff. Get on airplanes. Take people out for coffee. Drinks. Dinners. Do live workshops in person. Do live events. Everybody who's ever been to a great conference already knows this in their gut - there is something about just being in the room that no amount of bandwidth replaces. We've been pretending for a few years that we were past it. We're not past it. We're going back to it, and the people who go back first are going to win.
The same applies inside our companies. If your team only ever sees each other on a video call, you're going to lose them to a competitor who flies them somewhere twice a year. If your best clients only ever get an automated nurture from you, you're going to lose them to someone who actually sits across the table from them once a quarter.
Autonomous gives you the time. Deeply human is what you spend the time on. That's the trade.
Who you need on your team
Here's the practical question every leader I talk to keeps asking: how do I find the people on my team who can run both roads with me?
I look for two things, and they're both behavioral, not technical.
Continually curious. Most people try a tool, it doesn't do what they want, and they throw it in the trash can. They think technology is on a one-or-two-year cycle, so "it didn't work for me" means "it won't work for two years." But AI isn't on that cycle anymore. The thing that didn't work three months ago works now. So the question is, who on your team is willing to go, "I wonder if it would work now?" Not once, but continually. That's the disposition that compounds.
You don't have to be that person yourself. As the leader, you almost certainly aren't. But you need that person on your team. Who is that person? Who's staying up at night trying to figure this stuff out? Find them. Empower them.
What-if people, not yeah-but people. A what-if person says, "what if we could do this? What if it could do that? Let's try." A yeah-but person says, "yeah, but compliance. Yeah, but my workflow. Yeah, but my team won't go for it." Both reactions are reasonable. Only one of them moves you forward.
And here's the part that surprises everyone. The most technical people on your team aren't always the most AI-forward. Sometimes they are, but often they're not. Often the most AI-forward person is a generalist with a high-D personality - the idea person who could never get their ideas onto a screen before because they needed a whole team to do it for them. Now they can at least get a draft. Find that person. They're worth more to you than they used to be, by a lot.
What this means for how you lead
When I started bringing AI into my agency, a friend half-joked, "So are you going to finally lay off all your staff and let the robots do all the work?" I said no. I want to equip them. I want to train them. I want to empower them so we can create multiplied impact.
That answer isn't naive optimism. It's strategy. The team that figures out how to compose AI plus their human judgment plus deeper client relationships is going to run laps around the team that just bought a tool and called it a digital transformation.
So tell your team the truth. Will some jobs change? Maybe. Probably. We can't promise nothing changes, because everything is changing. But what we can promise is that we're going to fight for multiplied impact, not subtraction. We're going to make the autonomous road faster so we can spend the time we save on the human road.
Be a Builder, not a bystander. That's it. That's the whole posture.
One last thing
I lead two organizations. Business Builders, the marketing agency I've been running for 25 years. And I'm also Chief of Ministry Staff at one of the fastest-growing churches in the country, with about 250 staff. Two very different organizations, two very different missions, same exact question - how do we use these tools to do more of what only humans can do?
That's the bet. That's why I'm telling everyone I can: don't pick a road. Run both. Highly autonomous AND deeply human. At the same time. On purpose.
That's the future I'm building toward. I'd rather build it with you than watch you fight it.
