Nobody Knows Exactly What AI Will Ask of Your Company

Every company is trying to work out its AI plan, and some are further along than others. But nobody knows exactly what the next few years will require. That’s what makes the people side mission critical: your people are the ones who’ll have to adapt, again and again, as the answers change. Most of the effort so far has gone to tools and process, and the people work is landing on the same few people you already lean on.

Everyone’s working on a plan. Nobody has the answer.

Sit in on any leadership offsite this year and the AI conversation sounds about the same. Which tools. Which workflows. Which tasks come out of which roles, and how fast. Some companies are well along. Most are still figuring it out.

That work matters, and I’m not arguing against it. We use AI every day to build Ren.

But nobody actually knows what this will require two years from now. The tools will change. The roles will change. Whatever plan you write this quarter is going to get rewritten, probably more than once.

So what decides how it goes isn’t the plan. It’s whether your people can adapt as it changes. Does the team buy each change, or nod along and route around it? Does somebody say the plan is off while there’s still time to fix it? Does the person whose job just shifted hear what’s next from someone who cares about them, or find out from a slide?

When the plan keeps changing, your people are the part of it that has to keep up. That’s why the people side can’t wait.

Why it feels bigger than a software rollout

I’ve started calling AI the final boss of the information age. For a hundred years we’ve built our identities around what we think: our analysis, our output, being the one with the answers. That’s the identity AI is taking on, one task at a time.

So when someone on your team drags their feet on the new tools, it usually isn’t stubbornness. It’s a question they haven’t said out loud: if it can do what I do, what am I for?

Another tools workshop doesn’t answer that. It isn’t a skills gap. It’s a question about who you are at work, and it gets answered in conversation, with yourself first and then with someone who knows your work.

That question isn’t new. It’s the oldest one there is, what all of this is for, just turned all the way up. Plenty of people have spent years in jobs that never quite fit, unsure who they were underneath the work. AI is forcing the question, which is what makes it daunting. It’s also what makes it an opening: a whole workforce getting to ask who they are beyond what they produce, and to build on the parts of themselves the machine can’t reach.

That’s the human side of the transformation, a crisis and an opportunity in equal parts. In most companies, nobody owns either.

III

It lands on the people you already lean on

In a growing company it doesn’t go to nobody. It goes to the same few people. You promoted your best people to lead, and they’re already doing two jobs: the work they were great at, and leading a team.

Now they’re doing a third. Explaining the AI change, absorbing the worry it stirs up, working out who owns what once half a role gets automated. Nobody wrote that into the job, and nobody gave them anything to do it with.

So the hard conversations wait. The person who’s anxious goes quiet. The person who could grow into the new shape of the role never hears that they could. And the work routes back to the few who always cover, which sometimes includes you.

If your company is going to keep adapting, those conversations have to start happening everywhere, not just through your three best people.

What’s left is the part that was always human

Knowing which problem is actually the problem. Feeling that the plan is wrong and saying so before the quarter is spent on it. Seeing that someone is capable of more than they’re doing, and telling them in a way they can hear.

That’s the work that gets more valuable as the machine takes on the rest. It doesn’t get installed in a workshop. It grows in relationship: someone who knows your work telling you the truth about it, with care, over time.

We built infrastructure for sales, for code, for payroll and expenses. For growing people, we built a calendar invite and a form that’s due in December.

What Ren does about it

Ren is the people side, built to run next to the process side. It lives in Slack and Teams with everyone, managers and the people on their teams, tells each person which conversation is due, and helps them open it.

It’s built on the Accountability Dial from Good Authority: Mention, Invitation, Conversation, Boundary, Limit. Most things resolve at the first stage, a sentence said while the problem is still small. And it runs in every direction: to a direct report, to a peer, up to the boss, and to the person who did something great and never heard about it.

It doesn’t score anyone or report on anyone. It can’t read private messages. Each person finds their own words and decides whether to send them.

It fits next to the leadership development you already run. The program teaches the practice. Ren is there the Tuesday after, when the conversation actually comes up.

I built an AI, and it made me more sure about people, not less.

I didn’t arrive here because of AI

Good Authority came out in 2016, with the Dial in it. More than 100,000 people leaders have learned it through our programs since. We built Ren in 2025 so the practice could reach everyone, not just the people who got to be in the room. Panasonic Energy uses it today.

The machines didn’t change what I believe. They made it impossible to keep putting off.

Nobody knows exactly what AI will ask of your company.Your people are the ones who’ll figure it out.