Meet Ava Steele. She is 29 years old, holds a Top Tier MBA, is vegan-ish, and has just been appointed as a first-time manager at a blazing-hot Silicon Valley startup called Unicornify.AI. because of course it is called that.
She wore chunky sneakers and quoted Brené Brown in investor meetings. Ava had swagger, spreadsheets, and an emotional support Notion board. She also had a plan:
“Let AI do the grunt work. I shall focus on vision.”
Translation: Let the bots handle the real work, and I will sit on LinkedIn posting about servant leadership and quarterly chakra alignment.
It worked.
For three weeks.
Ava’s team built a new B2B onboarding platform using every AI tool you have heard of, and ten you have not. They fed ChatGPT prompts like candy. The UX came from Midjourney. The launch emails were created by Claude. The customer service policy came from Gemini Pro.
Nobody wrote a single original sentence.
Nobody talked to a single customer.
The app was sleek. Beautiful.
And absolutely useless.
It turns out the AI copy did not match the product.
The UX was designed for finance users, but their clients were in health tech.
And the privacy policy?
It was written in such generic legalese that it accidentally promised to protect data forever, including deleted data, which is a lawsuit waiting to happen.
But Ava did not notice.
Because Ava was too busy calling herself a “Tech Whisperer” on her new podcast.
Reality hit on Day 30.
Two clients churned.
The CTO quit.
The board called.
“What happened, Ava?”
“Well… we followed the data.”
“Whose data?”
Silence.
Leadership is not automation.
Let us be clear. AI is powerful. It can speed things up. It can spot patterns. It can even write that dull FAQ page you have been avoiding since 2021.
But it cannot replace leadership.
It cannot detect nuance in human behavior.
It cannot smell office politics.
It cannot tell you when your product is solving the wrong problem for the right market.
Ava’s mistake was not using AI.
It was outsourcing thinking.
She skipped the messy part: listening, testing, questioning, leading.
She let AI act like the manager.
And guess what?
AI does not care about your career.
The Comeback (Because There Is Always One)
To her credit, Ava did not double down.
She paused. Admitted it. Took the team off autopilot. Started asking real questions.
They rebuilt the product, slowly and intentionally.
And in that process, she became a leader.
Her ego shrank. Her empathy grew.
She stopped outsourcing judgment and started exercising it.
She did not fire herself, after all.
But she fired the version of herself who thought leadership was just a prompt away.
Takeaway for Aspiring Leaders, First-Time Managers, and First-Time CEOs in the AI World:
1. You cannot shortcut your way into influence.
2. AI might write your to-do list, but it will not earn your team’s trust.
3. Leadership still requires something terrifyingly analog: you.
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If you enjoyed this article, you can dive deeper into real-world leadership lessons and behind-the-scenes stories in my book Labyrinth of Management—available now on Amazon.
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