Do you judge colleagues by the quality of their PowerPoint presentations, or their spreadsheets?
We’ve all experienced the pressure of producing a presentation for a key stakeholder like a client. You did the research. You prepared the presentation outline. You feel good about the story arc you’ve developed. You feel good about the impact you’ll have on your audience. You know it’s going to resonate.
You get to work designing your presentation in PowerPoint or Keynote or your software of choice. This part is important because you want the presentation to deliver your message after you’ve worked tirelessly to produce it.
Let’s say you used PowerPoint. After an iterative process with your AI tool of choice, you’re pleased with the PowerPoint deck.
You feel ready for the client presentation. You’re confident because you put in the work.
You sleep well. The big day has arrived.. You deliver the presentation.
As you confidently expected, your audience loves it because it landed!
Of course, it landed. You planned it meticulously. You knew it would.
In this moment, you’re gloating with fulfillment. All that hard work paid off.
Then, the client’s lead person says it. At first, you thought you misheard what they said. But, you heard them correctly.
The client’s exact words in their flattery were, “Your AI did a great job on this presentation!”
In that moment you felt shattered. All your hard work was reduced to a robot. You received no credit for it. NONE.
I had a similar experience recently. A colleague and I presented information to a client. We worked hard to prepare a document with just the right information. Yes, we used AI to guide the final document. It was our collective discernment and expertise that drove the quality of the final output.
Yet, the client’s response was, “Your AI did a great job.”
If you’re a leader, I urge you to be self-aware when meeting with staff in review of a deliverable. Review the quality of the deliverable, not the technology behind it.
Consider that when a CFO presents a multi-million dollar budget to a board of directors for the next fiscal year, the CFO probably used a spreadsheet to produce the budget. Yet, the Board doesn’t say, “That’s a great spreadsheet?”
In the context of AI transformation, this is the Human Dividend™.
It’s a leader’s responsibility to recognize three human capabilities in their team, Discernment, Relational Intelligence, and Purpose-Driven Judgment, and to help their team harness them to produce work worth recognizing.
The client wasn’t wrong to assume we used AI, no different than the Board assumes a CFO used a spreadsheet. They were wrong about where the value came from.
Don’t recognize the AI. Recognize, coach, and develop the three human capacities behind it. That’s the Human Dividend™.
