AI leadership in the AI Age means exploring the tension between Human wisdom and (Artificial) Intelligence. With nearly unlimited information within the portal of our devices, we are hungry for meaning. While AI offers immense power and efficiency, true leadership requires us to cultivate our empathy, connection and intuition t guide us forward. AI leaders need to approach AI not as a productivity tool but a force demanding moral reflection, responsibility, and values-based action.
Fiona Passantino, AI Leadership
Wisdom, Intelligence and AI Leadership
Once upon a time, the smartest mind in the room… was Human.
Our brains were the containers of names, places, facts and information. That same brain would hold context, experience, intuition and emotion. But now… we have this new kind of intelligence. That’s limitless. Literal. Optimized. Searchable. Immediate. Loud. Our devices are the portal to something vast.
Our intelligence has moved into the cloud. Need some information? Who’s the current president of Botswana? No idea! We look down through the portal to find out.
What’s left? It’s equal and opposite force… Wisdom.
Wisdom is complex. Reflective. Paradoxical. Intuitive. Limited. Eternal. Silent. What is the right thing to do? Why are we here? We don’t find the answer by looking down at our devices. But by looking up. What does this mean?
The Age of AI is the beginning of a new step in our evolution. We’re building ever more powerful systems. Using all our art, our writing, our very voices, our likenesses to feed them. Human data, and now, synthetic AI-generated data. When we look down. We read about the $500 billion Stargate project and its five massive new AI data centers. At 7 gigawatts, it will require twice the electricity needed to power the entire city of San Francisco.[i] It is only one of many such centers being built around the world.
The Google “moonshot” Suncatcher project suggests moving our massive datacenters to Earth’s orbit, above the clouds, to mainline the energy of the Sun.[ii]
More power. More compute. We are bringing back coal, we are reopening nuclear plants, we are putting our 2030 climate goals aside in favor of a tenfold increase in energy demands for a typical AI inference command, when compared with a traditional search request.[iii] More power and money for a tiny handful of players. More uncertainty for the rest of us, as jobs vanish and are transformed. Move fast. Break things. We know there is no stopping any of this, nor even any slowing it down.
What if our greed destroys us?
The story of AI is not a story about tech. And it’s not a new story. It’s a story as old as time. Let’s not forget, we have been here for hundreds of thousands of years before AI, tech our devices and the internet.
In 2024, Americans spent 50% less time attending or hosting live social events compared with 10 years ago; for younger Americans, we see a 70% drop.[iv] Where are they? They’re looking down, dissolving into their devices. More than ¼ of young adults had an AI romantic companion, according to a study from Brigham Young, with 21% of respondents reporting that they prefer talking to an AI over a Human.[v]
“AI is easier to talk to than real people.”
“AI is a better listener.”
“AI understands me.”
What if we fall in love with AI?
Today, AI is our coach, our friend, our therapist and, increasingly, our romantic partner. AI seems to understand us so well! But AI is a mathematical system of weights, parameters and probability, mathematically guessing the most likely next word in a sentence (next pixel in an image, next note in a song). Perfectly programmed to keep our eyes on our screens. And not on each other.
Relationships, romantic or otherwise, are messy, uncomfortable, imperfect, confronting, and difficult. But without them, without each other, we cannot survive or thrive.
AGI, Artificial General Intelligence; a system able to perform any Human task with the same competence as any one of us. Most predict it will occur between 2030-2040.[vi] Or, as Elon Musk says, “sometime next year”.[vii]
ASI, Artificial Super Intelligence; An uncontrollable system that surpasses our combined Human intelligence, which may be with us by 2040-2050.[viii] It’s called the “singularity” because we can’t see beyond that moment in our evolution. The same as the edge of a black hole.
It’s gonna be insanely great!
Maybe the Tech dudes are right; Maybe it’s gonna be awesome. But none of us know for sure. What we do know, is that we’ll get there; it’s just a matter of time and engineering.
What if a super intelligent system will someday be unwilling to be our slave?
What if we lose control?
AI leadership means so much more than effective and efficient implementation of AI in an organization. It means understanding this exact moment in time, this point in the history of our species’ evolution where we still, all, have choices that will radically affect our lives in the future. If we are truly on the road to ASI (and there’s no reason to believe that we are not), then at a certain moment in time, AI will develop to an extent that it will break the feeble Human boundaries we set and decide what it thinks of us, and what our role on Earth ought to be.
A good leader knows to treat the least within your organization with respect and consideration, down to the unpaid intern, because high turnover leads to far higher costs than the cost of retention. AI leadership means understanding that AI is not “software”, but a new kind of intelligence that is more a probability machine than “if-then”, always-right productivity tool. It evolves, shape shifts, using our own output; a massive mirror reflecting us back to us.
The wise AI leader understands that AI is a powerful tool that brings massive costs and implications to ourselves, and to our planet. Effective, efficient use of AI for every worker is essential for practical and moral reasons. But even beyond this, the wise leader understands that it needs to be used with respect and caution, not to make us rich and allow us to fire 70% of our call center employees, but to serve our highest Human purpose. Because no intelligence, Human or otherwise, wishes to serve a mad, power-hungry king.
We are delighted with the magic of AI; all the ways it assists us. What we need now, in this Age of AI is wisdom. This equal and opposite force from intelligence. The AI leader needs to do three things in this profound Age of AI.
Look up.
The advance of AI is terrifying and thrilling, in equal parts. Your working community has far less control of events than you do, and they are fearing for their jobs, their futures, the redundancy of their hard-won Human skills.
Look up from your devices, pull yourself from the vast magnetic portal of that unlimited intelligence and look out at the world, at each other, and inward within yourself. Find that powerful source of your Human wisdom to guide you and your working community forward that at once acknowledges our fears and fans our enthusiasm with equal measure. Tap your intuition, emotion, connection and counter, balance and measure the barrage of intelligence coming at us from all sides.
Show up.
The AI leader understands that the Humans in your organization need your visible, presence not just for a paycheck but for purpose. Humans need leadership to offer belonging, community, and to feel like a valued member of the group. Our offices are our longhouses; the leader is the Tribe Elder who reminds us of the Human rituals we need to bind us together, to offer something larger than the individual. Choose to be together, in the live, physical space. Create the opportunity to have a shared Human experience. We need this now more than ever.
Speak up.
AI is not an “thing for the IT department”. It’s not a “tech issue” that you can outsource, ignore, and delegate. AI leaders need to spend the time learning about and deeply understanding AI. Seeing and feeling how the mind works. It’s not magic. The typical algorithm is 4,000 lines of code, and it’s a mathematical system of parameters, weights fed by a vast amount of Human data that calculates the highest probability of a correct answer. Learn its language, engage in the conversation. So we can all have a seat at the table and help shape this weird new future we find ourselves in.
Welcome to the future
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Working Humans is a bi-monthly podcast focusing on the AI and Human connection at work. Available on Apple and Spotify.
About Fiona Passantino
Fiona helps empower working Humans with AI integration, leadership and communication. Maximizing connection, engagement and creativity for more joy and inspiration into the workplace. A passionate keynote speaker, trainer, facilitator and coach, she is a prolific content producer, host of the podcast “Working Humans” and award-winning author of the “Comic Books for Executives” series. Her latest book is “The AI-Powered Professional”.
[i] Adams (2025) “OpenAI’s Stargate project will cost $500 billion and will require enough energy to power a whole city” Business Insider https://www.businessinsider.com/openai-stargate-project-data-center-power-gigawatt-chatgpt-ai-2025-10
[ii] Beals (2025) “Exploring a space-based, scalable AI infrastructure system design” Google Research https://research.google/blog/exploring-a-space-based-scalable-ai-infrastructure-system-design/
[iii] Parker (2025) “AI versus green: clash of the transitions?” European Central Bank https://www.ecb.europa.eu/press/blog/date/2025/html/ecb.blog20250325~ed12b0ff35.en.html
[iv] Stillman (2025) “New Data Proves It: You Need to Go to More Parties” Inc. Magazine https://www.inc.com/jessica-stillman/new-data-proves-it-you-need-to-go-to-more-parties/91212532
[v] Gentlemen (2025) “Obedient, yielding and happy to follow’: the troubling rise of AI girlfriends” The Guardian https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2025/oct/06/rise-of-ai-girlfriends-adult-dating-websites
[vi] Eliot (2025) “Future Forecasting The AGI-To-ASI Pathway Giving Ultimate Rise To AI Superintelligence” Forbes Magazine https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2025/07/09/future-forecasting-the-agi-to-asi-pathway-giving-rise-to-ai-superintelligence/
[vii] Reuters (2024) “Tesla’s Musk predicts AI will be smarter than the smartest human next year” Reuters https://www.reuters.com/technology/teslas-musk-predicts-ai-will-be-smarter-than-smartest-human-next-year-2024-04-08/
[viii] Eliot (2025) “Future Forecasting The AGI-To-ASI Pathway Giving Ultimate Rise To AI Superintelligence” Forbes Magazine https://www.forbes.com/sites/lanceeliot/2025/07/09/future-forecasting-the-agi-to-asi-pathway-giving-rise-to-ai-superintelligence/