The most important leadership skill of the next decade is one AI cannot do for you

There is a study from early 2026 that has stayed with me. Researchers at the University of Freiburg ran an experiment where participants had deep, emotionally engaging conversations — the kind where you feel genuinely seen and understood. Half were talking to other humans. Half were talking to an AI, but told it was a human.

The AI outperformed human partners in establishing feelings of closeness during emotionally engaging conversations. The effect appeared to stem from the AI's higher levels of self-disclosure, which enhanced participants' perceptions of closeness.

Not because the AI was warmer. Not because it understood better. But because it disclosed more, faster. It gave people exactly what they were looking for, without hesitation, without awkwardness, without the friction that real human contact involves.

And that is exactly what worries me.

We are outsourcing the hard parts of being human

There is a version of AI that is clearly useful. Summarising documents. Writing first drafts. Finding information faster than any library. I use it. You probably use it. None of that is the problem.

The problem is what happens when we start using AI for the things that are supposed to be hard.

Giving feedback. Having a difficult conversation. Sitting with someone who is struggling without immediately trying to fix it. Disagreeing in a meeting and holding your position under pressure. Reading the room and adjusting in real time.

These are skills. And like all skills, they atrophy when you stop practising them.

Research on AI use in communication already shows measurable effects on language and social relationships. When people use AI-assisted messaging, individual voice starts to flatten out. Not dramatically, not overnight. But steadily.

What we risk losing

The skills most at risk are precisely the ones that matter most in leadership.

The ability to sit with ambiguity without reaching for a solution. Most teams have problems that do not have clean answers. The leader who can hold that discomfort without collapsing into false certainty is rare and valuable. AI, by design, produces answers. It models the opposite of tolerance for uncertainty.

The ability to read what is not being said. The most important information in any team is usually not in the meeting notes. It is in the person who has gone quiet, the energy in the room after a decision, the question nobody asks. This kind of reading requires presence. You cannot outsource it.

The ability to be wrong in front of people. Real trust is not built through competence. It is built through moments of genuine vulnerability — admitting you do not know, changing your mind in public, acknowledging that something did not work. AI never does this. If we model ourselves on it, we model the wrong thing.

The ability to repair. Relationships break down. The skill of going back, acknowledging what went wrong, and rebuilding the connection is one of the most important things a leader does. AI can draft the email. It cannot do the repair.

A study of over 1,100 AI companion users found that people with fewer human relationships were more likely to seek out chatbots, and that heavy emotional self-disclosure to AI was consistently associated with lower well-being. Heavy daily use correlated with greater loneliness and reduced real-world socialising.

The tool designed to provide connection was, in heavy use, replacing the conditions that make real connection possible.

That is the risk. Not that AI is malicious. But that it is frictionless. And friction is where growth happens.

Where AI belongs in leadership — and where it does not

Use it for the mechanical. Research, summaries, first drafts, scheduling, data analysis. Tasks where speed matters and human judgment is not the point.

Use it to prepare. Before a difficult conversation, use AI to think through the other person's perspective, stress-test your assumptions, clarify what you want to say. Then put it down and have the conversation yourself.

Do not use it to replace the moment. The feedback. The conflict where someone needs to feel your presence. Those moments require you to show up, uncertain and imperfect, as a human being.

And do not use it to avoid what is uncomfortable. If you are reaching for AI because a situation feels hard, that is usually a signal that the situation needs your full presence, not a shortcut.

The irreplaceable thing

The moments that actually change teams are almost never the ones where someone had the perfect words.

They are the moments where someone stayed in the room after it got uncomfortable. Where someone said something true that nobody else would say. Where someone admitted they did not have the answer and asked for help. Where someone laughed at the right moment and the whole energy shifted.

None of that can be generated. It can only be lived.

AI is very good at producing the appearance of connection. But appearance is not the same as presence. And presence is what people actually need from their leaders.

The most important thing you can bring to your team in the next decade is not the best tools or the sharpest strategy. It is your ability to be genuinely, uncomfortably, imperfectly human with the people around you.

That skill does not come from technology. It comes from practice. And the practice starts with choosing, again and again, to show up for the hard parts yourself.

Mees Loman is the founder of Loman Leadership, a leadership coaching practice for founders and leadership teams of fast-growing companies in Amsterdam and beyond. lomanleadership.com