How to lead smarter with AI without losing the human touch

The smartest leaders, it seems, aren’t trying to compete with AI. Instead, they’re using it to take mundane, repetitive tasks off their plates, freeing up more time for the human side of leadership.

Speaking at the mid-point check-in of Her World’s Mentorship Programme 2026, panellists Pat Law, founder of social marketing agency Goodstuph; Rae Nah, head of Customer Experience at Singtel Singapore; and Crystal Lim-Lange, CEO of leadership consultancy Forest Wolf and founder of Deep Human Club, candidly share how AI can lighten your load – but with a few conditions.

Translating information

For Pat, who has been a founder for 16 years, making decisions based on financial reports is part of the job. But she admits that numbers aren’t her strongest suit. “I’ve seen how CFOs (Chief Financial Officers) work, and my brain does not work like that,” she quips.

Instead of engaging an external party to make sense of the numbers, she turns to AI to present them in an “idiot-proof format”. “AI allows me to make decisions like a CFO because I can get the data in a format that I understand,” she says.

Similarly, Rae uses AI to crunch large amounts of data and identify trends in business reports. She also treats it as a “sparring partner”, using AI to challenge her thinking and point out potential blind spots.

On the other hand, Crystal uses AI as a “second brain” – a repository for information such as long to-do lists and schedules. “You can empty your cache, close down all these tabs in your brain, and keep it free for the most important stuff like being present to others and making decisions,” she says. “I have my human brain here, but it’s no longer overloaded.”

What AI can’t do

While they may have different applications and usages of AI, there’s one thing these three leaders agree on: They never let AI do the executive thinking.

Rae believes that AI can never replace human judgement and emotional intelligence. A town hall speech written by AI without considering who the audience is, their emotional attachment to the topic, or how you want the message to come across, she explains, is a classic case of how “AI will accelerate this disaster”.

For Pat, the biggest concern for leaders is “cultural laziness” – becoming so used to AI’s speed and ease that we stop thinking for ourselves. “We get so obsessed with efficiency. We sometimes mistake laziness for efficiency,” she observes. She shares how, as an advertising creative, she’d never use AI to come up with advertising copy. Instead, she uses it to check that the tag lines she comes up with don’t already exist for another brand.

“If I use AI to do the part of the job I love then – wait a minute – I just took my own passion. And I would never do that,” she states.

Crystal is similarly clear about where AI falls short. There are three things she believes it can’t replicate: storytelling, trust-building and taste. As she puts it, storytelling means speaking from the gravitas of lived experiences. Trust, meanwhile, is built through human skills like empathy and resonance, not just having the right information. And taste means having your own unique, authentic style, especially when trends are changing at breakneck speed.

It is simply a tool

So, how should leaders use AI, then? Pat has a simple way of thinking about it: Imagine AI as an oven in a fully equipped restaurant kitchen.

“Nobody comes to your restaurant because you have the latest oven. They come because of your food – and that is your imagination, creativity and judgement.

“Remember that you are the chef of your own community. What you want to put on the menu is really up to you.”