The question I asked on live TV: which of you has a plan for AI?
On 5 November I stood up on live television and asked our politicians a question. It was the last one of the evening on TVNZ's Q+A People's Debate, and it went like this:
“I’ve been training business leaders for a living for 20 years. Now I’m seeing AI change their jobs from month to month. It’s going to change how we all live and work more than anything in our lifetimes, and yet it’s barely mentioned in anyone’s campaign. Each of you has a plan for the cost of living, but which of you has a plan for AI?”
You can watch it here and judge the answers for yourself.
I asked because of what I've watched happen in my own programmes this year. As AI has rolled out across whole organisations, people have started turning up with presentations they didn't create and don't really own. They look great. Tidy slides, fluent script, not a typo in sight. Then someone asks a challenging question and the whole thing falls apart.
If you've been on one of my programmes you'll remember the ten Archetypes of Organisational Speakers: the patterns I've seen over twenty years of watching people present, from those stuck in the shadows to those in the spotlight. One of them is The Reader, head down in the notes, reading to the room. This year The Reader got a cousin. I've called them The Outsourcer. They're the eleventh archetype, and the first I've added since I published the model. The Outsourcer owns the topic but doesn't do the work. They ask the machine, it hands them something polished, and they read it out. The thinking is borrowed, so when the room pushes back there's nothing underneath.
That's bad presenting, and it matters more than it used to. People are beginning to doubt what they read, because any document could now have been written by a machine and nobody can reliably tell. So where does a person show that the thinking is theirs? In the room. Out loud, with the questions coming. That's where you exercise judgement, where you're accountable for your ideas, and where trust gets earned. Being good in that room is worth more than it's ever been.
None of this means leaving AI alone. We use it, and this year has made me rethink how we teach with it. You'll remember the Planning Canvas. We've digitised it, so it now turns your planning into a properly good prompt. You still do the thinking: your audience, your Big Idea, your ask. Then AI helps you build a storyboard and slides that carry your argument and help you defend it, instead of the generic nonsense you get when you ask it cold. We'll be sharing it shortly.
I've spent a good few months digging into the research and working out what I think about all this. The result is a white paper called The Human Edge. It's a guide for people who develop leaders, though anyone who presents will find themselves in it somewhere. It covers what AI is doing to trust, why the room is where accountability now lives, all eleven archetypes, and the method for getting people out of the shadows and into the spotlight.
Read The Human Edge (free PDF)
I'd like as many people as possible to pick it up and think about what it means for their own teams. If someone at your organisation looks after developing leaders, please pass it on.
The Human Edge sets out the thinking behind how we teach presenting now. The Spotlight is where it starts – in-house, for teams, anywhere in New Zealand. Tell us about your team.
Russell Pickering – founder of The Pickering Group, author of Step into the Spotlight.