Five Traps That Catch Leaders Out with AI

Two articles in, I've made the case for AI as a genuine leadership tool. A thinking partner. A mirror. A rehearsal room.

This week I want to talk about what goes wrong.

Because enthusiasm without critical thinking is itself a leadership failure. And when it comes to AI, most of the enthusiasm I see in organisations right now is running well ahead of the critical thinking.

The trap I fell into first

When I started using AI to write emails, they were faster, polished, and felt like an upgrade. Until I read some of them back and got the ick.

They just weren't mine. And an email is a conversation between two people - so I should sound like one of them.

That experience sits at the heart of this week's article. It's the third in the The Leadership AI Gap series, and it covers five specific traps: automation bias, cognitive deskilling, the perception gap, ethics blind spots, and the meaning crisis.

Each one is real. Each one is avoidable. But only if you know to look for it.

The one worth thinking about today

The trap I find most underestimated is the meaning crisis - what happens to your experience of leadership when AI starts doing too much of the human work.

It's the least discussed. It might be the most important.

The full article is on LinkedIn. It's a five minute read.

And if you want the thinking behind the thinking, subscribe to Taggart's People on Substack, where I publish a companion piece for each article.

Before then: which of the five traps is the one you're most at risk from?