In this post I explore why human currency is actually increasing in value as AI technology proliferates — and why the leaders who understand this will be the ones who matter most.
Knowing When to Use What Tools
The best leaders aren't the ones who use AI the most — they're the ones who know when it adds value and when it doesn't. A carpenter doesn't reach for the same tool on every job, and neither should we. This is fundamentally a judgement call, and judgement is earned through experience, context, and accountability.
Reaching for AI on every task can undermine your credibility, just like over-relying on any single framework. The art form is knowing when AI can help, how it can help, and where a problem needs human guidance first. Yes, product leaders can now auto-generate a discovery plan — but the real value-adders are the ones who know when a specific problem needs a messy, human workshop before anything else.
Human Authenticity
AI can generate content that is polished, coherent, and credible — but it cannot have a reputation, a track record, or skin in the game. Authenticity is about being known, trusted, and consistent over time.
Even with AI, the decision makers, purchasers, and prospects are still humans — and humans remain emotional creatures. How many times have you told a chatbot "let me speak to a human"?
Being known, trusted, accountable, and consistent over time still holds enormous value — and is arguably more important than it was before. AI is an awesome, multi-functional tool. But the best tools have a human behind them guiding their use.
Stakeholder Management and Influencing
Influencing is fundamentally relational. It depends on reading the room, understanding unspoken agendas, knowing when to push and when to park an idea. These capabilities emerge from emotional intelligence and organisational history — neither of which AI can replicate.
AI can help you refine, present, and data-inform your arguments — but moving people, changing minds, and building coalitions requires a history of trust, an understanding of your audience's motivations, and the ability to navigate through organisational politics. Stakeholders can get facts from AI. They still need a human to serve their emotional needs.
Galvanising Your Business
Vision without momentum is just a slide deck. Leaders create energy — they connect people to a why, not just a what. This is especially critical during AI transformation, where uncertainty and change fatigue are real.
Getting organisations to move forward requires narrative, presence, and conviction. Humans follow humans, not just a roadmap and a list of tasks. AI can produce a change management plan — but there is still a space for strong human leaders who can take that plan and rally a room around it. People with this ability were already valuable and in-demand. As AI proliferates, leaders who can cut through the noise and galvanise people will only become more so.
Forward Thinking
Leadership has always required holding the tension between today's execution and tomorrow's direction. AI actually increases the premium on this — because execution tasks are increasingly automatable, leaving strategy, horizon-scanning, and ethical foresight as distinctly human responsibilities.
Try this experiment: ask an AI model to predict market conditions two years from now. It struggles — in part because forming a picture of the future can't be reliably extrapolated from past training data. It requires imagination and foresight. Which trends matter versus what's just noise? What's ethical, what's not? A leader's responsibility is now to shape how AI is adopted — not to blindly chase every LinkedIn post about it.
Accountability and Ownership
AI doesn't take responsibility when things go wrong. Leaders do. AI can inform a decision. It cannot own one. That distinction is where leadership lives.
When something goes wrong in an AI-assisted process, there's a natural human tendency to point at the output: "The model gave us that recommendation." "The tool missed it." "We were following the synthesis." This isn't dishonest — it's just how people manage cognitive discomfort. But it's corrosive to trust, and it's exactly where leadership either shows up or doesn't.
The leader who says "I made that call, and here's what I'm doing about it" is increasingly rare — and therefore increasingly valuable.
Curiosity and Learning Agility
The leaders who will thrive aren't necessarily the most technically literate — they're the ones most willing to stay curious and adapt. During periods of uncertainty and change, it's usually those who can evolve who come out on top.
Right now, curiosity, learning agility, and adaptability are the key differentiators between product leaders whose roles will be disrupted by AI, and those who will leverage AI to stay curious, relevant, and genuinely rewarded by their work.
Developing Other People
People follow people. Coaching, mentoring, and building team capability are all fundamentally human, not-easily-automatable activities. Leaders who are strong in these areas will fare well. Businesses will still need humans and leaders for some time yet — AI will automate repetitive tasks, which means those with strong human attributes are about to become much, much more valuable.
Conclusion
Lots of noise, lots of hype, lots of fear. But rest assured — the value of human leadership isn't diminished by AI. It's clarified by it. The things that can't be automated turn out to be the things that matter most: judgement, trust, authenticity, and the ability to move people toward something worth doing.
If you'd like to explore AI Product Practice in more depth, take a look at my earlier post: AI Powered Product Practice →