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The Rise of the AI-Augmented Leader
6 Plays1 month ago
Over the past 36 months, we’ve witnessed the quiet emergence of something profound: the rise of the AI-augmented leader.
What began as simple tools like ChatGPT and Claude is rapidly evolving into a digital workforce—AI agents capable of executing tasks, supporting decisions, and fundamentally reshaping how organizations operate.
This episode explores the leadership, identity, and strategic implications of this shift. Companies are deploying AI agents alongside employees. Entire workflows—from finance to legal to marketing—are becoming augmented or automated. Leaders are no longer simply managing people; they are orchestrating intelligence.
But this is not a message of fear. It is a call to preparation.
The leaders who embrace AI today will multiply their effectiveness, expand their influence, and remain relevant in a rapidly evolving world. Those who ignore it risk obsolescence—not because AI replaces them, but because others will use AI to move faster, think deeper, and execute better.
This episode is about mindset, strategy, and leadership in the age of exponential intelligence. This is the rise of the AI-augmented leader.
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Transcript
Introduction and Serendipity
00:00:04
Speaker
The Voice of Growth, Mastering the Mind and Market. Welcome to the Voice of Growth podcast, Mastering the Mind and Market. My name is Manny Turan, and I'm your host.
00:00:17
Speaker
On today's podcast, I am leveraging a bit of a serendipitous moment over the weekend. I fought off a cold. Luckily, it didn't get too bad, but you can tell by my voice, it sounds a little different.
AI-Augmented Leadership: A New Era?
00:00:29
Speaker
And it gave me the impetus to talk about today's subject, which is the idea of the AI augmented leader and the rise thereof.
00:00:41
Speaker
Over the past 36 months or so, you've seen people diving into these large language models like ChatGPT and Claude and Thropic and all that. And you're seeing this this element of using AI to support them in their jobs.
00:00:57
Speaker
And you're hearing small semblances, you're you're seeing seedlings form that are the beginning of the idea of this agentic workforce, this digital workforce.
00:01:09
Speaker
And you hear things on the news, you hear sound bites on social media, but what's happening is we're getting that ground swell. Those seeds are beginning to germinate. And those seeds of change are, if you're not smart about it, could decimate your job.
00:01:27
Speaker
Now, yes, there's a lot of gloom and doom on the idea of what's happening with AI. Is it going to take your job away? All these things. And yeah, we can sit here as stoics and basically not worry about it or essentially only worry about what you can control, which is here, but it doesn't mean that you are to remain inactive. It doesn't mean that you're not supposed to do things and prepare in preparation for this new way of working. There are some things happening right now that are behind the scenes and with respect to the AI digital workforce, and they're beginning to show their fangs out in the
AI's Impact on Jobs and Business Operations
00:02:08
Speaker
industry.
00:02:08
Speaker
Let me give you some examples. So for instance, Klarna's CEO expects their workforce to be reduced from 7,000 employees to under employees due to ai automation That means that you're able to do more with less people.
00:02:28
Speaker
There is this idea of the shift between ai becoming a tool to AI becoming part of the workforce. There's ah consulting firms like McKinsey and PricewaterhouseCoopers are basically deploying thousands of AI agents out there to automate and and sustain and create partnerships with employees such that one or even creating one employee to one agent and you're having this agent support you in your daily tasks. So your efficiency is on the rise.
00:03:08
Speaker
The focus now is now more on productivity gains and business outcomes and it it is no longer just experimentation. Yeah, it might be experimentation in your domain. You might be sort of sticking your toe in the water, but it'd be smart for you to dedicate a lot of time, a lot of resources to exploring how your company will not just deal with AI, but capitalize on it.
Industries Transformed by AI: A Call to Adapt
00:03:38
Speaker
What are you going to do in your workforce? If you're a law firm, if you're an accounting firm, if you're a marketing firm, if you are an engineering firm, if you're a manufacturing firm, if you are a restaurant if you're a hospitality, like a hotel or a resort, all these things I've mentioned so far, and I can go on and on and on, are going to be touched if not decimated by AI.
00:04:04
Speaker
I'm not a gloom and doom guy, but I want you to be armed. I want you to be ready for these things as you begin to take hold. Leaders now must orchestrate human plus AI teams.
00:04:18
Speaker
There will come a time when your Zoom call is going to have 12 tiles of different people and three or four of those tiles will be AI agents. They'll have an avatar like my face here and they're going to have voice and you're going to say, Bill, can you please make sure to get that economic outlook report to me, absolutely, Manny, and you're going to see that that agent go back and retrieve that. I just email it to you. You're going to see these things become ubiquitous, just like we today are using our cell phones to ah map our way to different places or book travel or communicate, whatever, in how it is ubiquitous now.
The Rise of AI Agents: The New Norm
00:05:01
Speaker
You'll see AI agents part of the the fabric of the marketplace. You're gonna talk to AI agents on the phone. you're going to and And this is more than just now. Of course, now we're you know you're we're sort of like getting there and you're getting frustrated and you're hitting zero because you wanna get to the operator because you have a very, very unique case.
00:05:25
Speaker
You're going to see these AI agents become very sophisticated to the point where your very, very unique situation is going to be addressed just like a human would, if not faster.
00:05:38
Speaker
Because they're going to be these agents are going to be talking to other agents, are going to be talking to the computer systems and getting the answer that you want faster and with more efficiency.
00:05:49
Speaker
The rise of these agentic workflows, so these are the AI systems that execute entire business functions, are on the rise. You're going to see small companies with rather than having a CFO or a controller, you're going to see them have an entire agent that handles all those aspects. Now, you still need a person to make the transaction.
00:06:16
Speaker
for now, but a CEO can basically run their entire company with a CFO agent, with maybe a legal agent that's helping them with contracts, with certain things.
00:06:29
Speaker
And more more importantly, if your're if your current lawyer, your current law firm, your current CPA firm, whatever, if they're not deploying and using AI today, you may want to find another law firm.
00:06:45
Speaker
That may sound contrary to a lot of what business people are saying today, but what I'm talking about is the rise of that agentic AI enabled leader.
00:07:00
Speaker
The organization that is able to capture the power of AI today is going to be there
Embracing AI: Key to Thriving Organizations
00:07:08
Speaker
for the future and that those that do not embrace AI are going to be stuck in a certain path of today and of yesterday.
00:07:19
Speaker
I say this having lots of friends that are powerful lawyers in town that run law firms, that run CPA firms.
00:07:29
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And i asked them casually about how they're doing, how they're working with AI. And the extent today is, oh yeah, we use ChatGPT or we use the specialized tool that is for the accounting industry, blah, blah, blah, which is which is fine, its it's baby steps.
00:07:46
Speaker
What I'm asking here to do, you to do is to dive in find out what are the top firms doing to advance their cause forward so that in the next five years when things completely change, you're ready.
00:08:02
Speaker
Another thing that's happening is AI is forcing a leadership and identity reset. It's causing us to look inward deeply and figure out how our future, our livelihoods will be changed forever more by AI, myself included.
00:08:24
Speaker
I'm the CEO of an organization here in town. I have 15 employees. We work on manufactured and designed systems for the astronomy industry as well as semiconductor.
Personal Reflections on AI's Role
00:08:39
Speaker
And I need to look at what's my role going to be in the future as somebody who makes decisions. I look at my role as a podcaster. I look at my role as a business coach. How is that going to change when AI is at your fingertips and basically free?
00:08:57
Speaker
If you can pay 50 bucks a month for an an AI business coach that can look at the collective exhaustive knowledge of business transactions and whether they were successful or not, and you can draw from that,
00:09:14
Speaker
Why would you spend $500 an hour if instead you could spend 50 bucks a month and have it at your fingertips? You see what I'm saying? Now, think about the power that if you do have a business coach and they have access to that and together that trifecta can decide what is the best course of action for your business, imagine the power.
00:09:39
Speaker
The idea of this podcast came because of my sickness here and the idea that my employees call in sick, I can certainly call in sick.
00:09:51
Speaker
AI agents do not call in sick. They're only powered by electricity and questions. And that was a stark realization that I need to take my own message of this idea of the AI augmented leader to higher and higher levels, because I can see the writing on the wall.
AI's Future: Sentience and Quantum Computing
00:10:18
Speaker
I talk to AI experts all the time. This morning at a breakfast club I'm part of, a leader of a very large, very large, very well-known $50 billion dollars plus organization,
00:10:35
Speaker
She leads the local component of that. She was talking about how her company powers the back end of a lot of these things that we enjoy today.
00:10:45
Speaker
Credit card transactions, going to the DMV and changing certain things about what we are addressed or whatever. All these things on the back end are powered by the company that she works for. There was questions about when will AI become sentient?
00:10:59
Speaker
And her response was when quantum computing becomes a standard. Now, that coupled with other conversations I've had with AI experts, both in the public sense, some of which I've featured on my podcast, some that are behind the scenes that choose not to be vocal,
00:11:21
Speaker
there All of that collectively gave me a push and a drive to share the message of why the AI augmented leader needs to be topic of focus for this podcast and for the work that I do.
Historical Parallels: AI vs. Early Internet
00:11:42
Speaker
The reason in particular I think it's so important because I want people that I work with, my colleagues, people on the same market, in the same region, friends of mine, i want them to be empowered by what's happening with AI today. I want them to have relevancy in the future because they chose to understand this early.
00:12:05
Speaker
It reminds me of the days of early email, early websites, early, you know, most ah when when when Google was not even a thing yet. I remember those days.
00:12:16
Speaker
And those that got to those that understood how to navigate that, quote, internet, those early adopters were, know, propelled forward faster than those that took a while to latch on to the email world.
00:12:33
Speaker
And I see that today right now. I am by no means an expert in ai but I'm doing my best to understand how to use it. And it's not just a question of using it for the podcast or using it for my other company. It's a question of going leaps and bounds beyond that to create an agent that can be my virtual assistant, to understand how I can take this podcast, for instance, to higher levels of not only of awareness, but of the depth of topics and all that by using these AI
Merging AI with Leadership for Success
00:13:14
Speaker
agents.
00:13:14
Speaker
So I'm on a personal mission In addition to the stoicism, which I think is is integral part of this, because it's going to call into question our very identity of who are we becoming as as servant leaders. What's happening here with the industry when ai agents are everywhere and you're looking at your own skillset slipping away from you.
00:13:41
Speaker
I don't want that. I want you to have full command of this so that you can take your leadership skills, your company, your team to higher on levels of success and relevancy.
00:13:55
Speaker
One of the things that that rings true, you know that we have these things in our mind from moments in our lives that continually just hit a note in our head.
00:14:09
Speaker
Whether it's something somebody said or something you saw play out in front of you or in your own experience of making decisions or whatever. I have a handful of these things that I keep really close to the chest.
00:14:23
Speaker
One of these is when my, she's now 94, my 94 year old grandmother told me that one of the worst feelings to have in life is to feel irrelevant.
00:14:41
Speaker
Relevancy, we take for granted. Relevancy is we walk into a room, people know our names. Relevancy is we watch the news and we understand kind of what's happening.
00:14:54
Speaker
And it's like this dark mask, this veil comes over us and we slowly become irrelevant. I do not want any of my friends or colleagues or employees or family members to ever feel irrelevant because of the power of and the growth of AI.
00:15:16
Speaker
So let this be a a war charge, a war cry. to fully dive in and understand how you can use and become a AI augmented leader.
00:15:31
Speaker
Take your leadership skills and not just bolt on AI elements. Take your leadership skills and completely mix in AI skills so that at one point in time, you will not be able to separate your leadership skills from those that you've added on and mixed in from AI.
00:15:57
Speaker
I've been thinking about this in particular for a while. This weekend was the sort of the spark that caused this conversation. And one of the things I'm going to be doing here is I'm going to be working with some of my AI guru friends.
00:16:13
Speaker
to create a bit of a very simple map that can be used by the industry to help certain kinds of leaders, not just put their toe in the AI world, but dive right in It's confusing to be honest. I mean, you look on the the news and there's so much stuff happening and you don't you can't keep track of ChatGPT version 3.2, blah, blah, blah, blah. All these things are happening and it's kind of mind boggling.
00:16:40
Speaker
So let's keep it simple.
Teasers for Future AI Innovations Discussions
00:16:43
Speaker
What are these first few steps you can take in order to harness the power of AI? And I'm excited to share that over the past a couple of weeks, we have gotten some really good people on our docket that we'll be presenting for the podcast.
00:16:58
Speaker
um We have some people that are really doing some interesting things with the biosphere. So if you don't know about the biosphere, biosphere one is the earth. Biosphere 2 is this fully enclosed environment here just north of Tucson, where I think seven scientists were locked in there for two years. And it has has these biomes and these complete habitats and has like the rainforest and the desert. And there it's it's a pretty amazing test bed. While they're doing Biosphere 3, which is the digital twin version of that.
00:17:37
Speaker
So we're gonna be speaking with people that have really an integral working knowledge of what's happening there. And these are all elements of AI. there are There's all this this piece of AI that's thread through these conversations we're having.
00:17:51
Speaker
So with that, thanks for this opportunity to share my thoughts. Remember, figure out how you can change your your own identity to become an AI augmented leader so that you can take advantage of the growth and the power of AI and not be left behind and not become irrelevant and to continue to Take your own voice, your own voice of growth, and expand it and grow it to those that you care about.
00:18:21
Speaker
Thanks a lot. Cheers.