Mentoring in the age of AI

AI amplifies the culture it enters

Here’s the line I keep coming back to: AI amplifies the culture it enters. It doesn’t fix a broken culture — it scales it. If your organisation runs on trust, clarity and good judgement, AI will make those strengths faster and sharper. If it runs on ambiguity, blame and burnout, AI will make those louder too.

That’s why I treat AI adoption as a culture and judgement problem first, and a technology problem second. The leaders who get the most from these tools aren’t the ones who learned the cleverest prompts — they’re the ones who already had something worth amplifying. So before we talk about tools, we talk about the culture they’re about to pour into.

What to delegate, and what to never outsource

AI is genuinely good at a particular kind of work — the first 70 per cent. I encourage the leaders I mentor to hand over the parts that drain time without drawing on what makes them human:

• Drafting — first versions of emails, briefs and proposals.
• Summarising — condensing long documents, threads and reports.
• First passes — structuring a plan or shaping rough ideas.
• Session notes — capturing and tidying what was discussed.

And then there’s the work you must never outsource — not because AI can’t attempt it, but because the moment it does, you’ve given away the very thing leadership is for:

• Judgement — deciding what actually matters and what to do about it.
• Trust — the relationship you hold with your people over time.
• Accountability — owning the outcome, especially when it goes wrong.
• The human moment — the difficult conversation, the recognition, the apology, the reassurance that only lands when a person delivers it.

The risk of outsourcing your thinking

My biggest worry isn’t that AI replaces leaders — it’s that it quietly hollows out their thinking. These tools can make us faster at being shallow. You can produce a confident, well-formatted answer in seconds and never actually wrestle with the question. Speed feels like progress, but skipping the thinking is how judgement atrophies.

Mentoring keeps the reflection in. When a leader brings me an AI-generated plan, my job isn’t to admire how polished it is — it’s to ask the questions the tool didn’t: What are you assuming? Who’s affected? What would you do if the tool weren’t available? That pause is where the real leadership lives.

Using AI well within mentoring

I’m not precious about this — I use AI in my own mentoring practice. But I’m deliberate about where. It belongs in the scaffolding around the relationship, never in the relationship itself:

• Reflection prompts — helping a mentee prepare before we meet, so we spend our time on what matters.
• Note-taking — capturing what was agreed so neither of us is scrambling to remember.
• Action tracking — keeping momentum between sessions and gently chasing the commitments that tend to slip.

What stays human is the listening, the challenge and the trust built over time. The tool serves the relationship; it never becomes it.

Adopting AI without losing people

Most of the anxiety I hear about AI isn’t really about the technology — it’s about belonging. People want to know whether there’s still a place for them. If leaders roll out AI without naming that fear, they don’t just risk a clumsy adoption; they risk losing the trust that makes any change possible.

So I mentor leaders to adopt AI and keep their people — to be clear about what’s changing, honest about what isn’t, and visible in how they protect the human moments that matter. Done well, AI frees people up for the work that needs them most. Done carelessly, it tells them they’re replaceable. The difference is leadership.

For more on where this is heading, explore AI, belonging and the future of work as a keynote or workshop theme, or read more on how I approach mentoring.

Take it further

Browse more guides on inclusion, leadership and belonging, or get in touch to talk about mentoring through AI change. A 30-minute conversation is a good place to start.