Three Ways AI Can Help You Be More Present In Your Leadership
By utilizing various resources and strategies, effective leaders can create a positive and productive work environment for their employees. They understand the importance of being present, actively participating, and motivating their team members. Through their actions and support, these leaders can inspire and enable their teams to achieve their goals. Their commitment to utilizing all available tools demonstrates their dedication to fostering a culture of success within the organization.
Chris O'Neill builds and scales enduring companies. Currently the CEO of GrowthLoop , he has led teams at Google, Evernote, Glean and Xero.
Acknowledging Team Contributions
When I was first learning to lead a team, I used a simple trick to keep myself accountable: five paper clips in my right pocket. Each time I recognized or praised a team member, I moved one to my left pocket. By the end of the day, my goal was to have moved all five. These weren't office supplies—they were reminders. This small habit ensured I was intentional about acknowledging my team's contributions.
Today, I don't rely on paper clips, but I do rely on something far more powerful: AI. Just as those clips reminded me to be a more present leader, AI tools can now help us lead with greater clarity, presence, and impact.
Efficiency with AI
As a leader, countless competing priorities demand your finite attention. Even with a talented assistant or chief of staff, leaders must be ruthlessly efficient with their time, energy, and attention. Our empathy and humanity are some of our most valuable leadership qualities, but they can get lost in the often chaotic day-to-day reality of leading and managing a business.
Despite our best intentions to invest our energy in the people we lead, we might not recognize our team as often as we'd like. We may forget to ask open-ended questions or provide the in-depth guidance we'd like to. As AI's reasoning capabilities evolve, its potential as a leadership tool becomes clear. Like any tool, however, its value depends on how we use it.
AI as a Leadership Tool
You're probably already thinking about how AI will transform your business, but you're missing a prime opportunity if you aren't using it to improve your leadership processes. As CEO, your role is to create and communicate a vision to your team. That must start with a deep understanding of your market and industry.
AI-powered market intelligence tools like ChatGPT, Claude, or AlphaSense can track key trends and competitive shifts in real time. Then, you can prompt them to distill these insights into digestible background details that can help sharpen your vision.
Once you've crafted a company vision and started sharing it with your leadership team, these tools can remind you to continue to communicate it. For instance, ChatGPT's "scheduled tasks" feature can automate prompts for the tool to proactively reach out and remind you to reinforce part of the vision or check in with your leadership team.
Enhancing Coaching with AI
Some leaders have historically had software in their corner to help them lead and coach well. A system of record like Salesforce can give managers basic insights like the number of opportunities created and closed. I see AI surfacing deeper insights that give leaders (sales and otherwise) additional context to train and coach more effectively.
Transcription tools like Chorus and Otter.ai can not only summarize meetings but also analyze sentiment, track key action items, and identify engagement patterns—giving leaders a data-driven way to refine their coaching approach. Its processing power can help busy leaders zero in on their team's needs and the most pressing opportunities for improvement.
Staying Present in Meetings
Staying focused in a conference room was challenging 10 years ago. Staying on track in today's hybrid and virtual settings can feel impossible. While it may seem counterintuitive, AI can be one of your best assets for staying present in meetings by taking notes and outlining agenda items.
This allows you to focus your energy on asking relevant questions of the team to make everyone's time more productive. Before joining the meeting, use AI to keep you focused by summarizing prep materials, creating an agenda based on your desired outcomes for the call, or reminding you to recognize a specific project or individual.
Final Thoughts on AI and Leadership
AI can't replace human leadership, but it can help us focus on what matters. Leadership is about presence. Whether it's a pocket full of paper clips or an AI-powered assistant, the best leaders use every tool available to ensure they show up, stay engaged, and empower their teams to succeed.
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