Here’s the confession I never thought I’d make: I’m burned out on AI.
Not because it doesn’t work. Because it works too well.
Last month, I used Claude to generate a curriculum for three new classes in two days. On top of the teaching frameworks, I was able to quickly build learning objectives, discussion points, and in-class discussions. What used to take me weeks of thinking, outlining, and refining happened in hours.
But here’s where it gets messy. While I’m cranking out course content with maximum efficiency, my consulting business and the thought leadership that actually differentiates me sits untouched. I haven’t written an original strategic piece in weeks because I’m too busy reviewing AI-generated lectures and workshops.
It gets worse. With AI, my marketing workflows can scale outreach like crazy. However, every campaign still needs human approval to respect relationships and control messaging, except that my approval process has become the bottleneck. Campaign timelines drift while I sit on strategy reviews because, ironically, the rest of my business is moving too fast to slow down.
I had this realization while talking to my coach about “what to do more” and “what to do less.” The problem isn’t that I need to stop doing more. It’s that I literally cannot do less because AI has made my business so efficient that the pace itself has become unsustainable.
This is the paradox nobody talks about in AI adoption: the technology succeeds so well at scaling the formulaic parts of our work that we drown in our own productivity. We get more output than we can humanly process, review, or act upon.
So what do we do when AI efficiency threatens the human-centered work that actually matters?
Beginner approach: Set boundaries. Define “AI hours” and “human hours” in your day. Protect strategic thinking time like you’d protect client meetings.
Intermediate approach: Build approval workflows into your AI processes from the start. Don’t let AI generate anything that doesn’t have a clear human decision point built in.
Advanced approach: Redesign your business model around human judgment being the premium service. Let AI handle the commodity work while you focus exclusively on the strategic decisions only humans can make.
The managers who figure this out will become more intentionally human in their leadership.
That’s what we’re covering in my upcoming courses.
AI for Managers (November 7th) focuses on building these frameworks and boundaries.
AI Agents (November 14th) is for those ready to redesign their workflows around human-AI collaboration.
If you’re navigating this same paradox or you know someone who is, join me for one of these sessions.
