The 5 AI Tensions Leaders Need to Navigate

"When Polish endoscopists began using AI to detect cancer, their accuracy improved. But their performance on non-AI procedures got worse. When students used AI to draft SAT-style essays, their creativity initially spiked. Yet those who started with AI-generated ideas showed reduced alpha-wave activity (a marker of creative flow), " tended to converge on common words and ideas," and their "output was very, very similar" to one another's."

"And in a 2025 study spanning 20 European countries, workers in highly automated jobs reported less purpose, less control, and more stress, even when their work became technically easier. Rebecca Hinds is the Head of the Work AI Institute at Glean. She previously founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana and is the author of the forthcoming book, Your Best Meeting Ever: 7 Principles for Designing Meetings That Get Things Done (Simon & Schuster, 2026)."

" is an Robert I. Sutton organizational psychologist and Professor Emeritus of Management Science and Engineering at Stanford University. He has written eight books, including (with Huggy Rao) The Friction Project: How Smart Leaders Make the Right Things Easier and the Wrong Things Harder (St. Martin's Press, 2024)."

Polish endoscopists using AI to detect cancer achieved higher accuracy, while their performance on non-AI procedures declined. Students who used AI to draft SAT-style essays experienced an initial boost in creativity, but those who began with AI-generated ideas showed reduced alpha-wave activity, tended to converge on common words and ideas, and produced very similar outputs. A 2025 study across 20 European countries found that workers in highly automated jobs reported less purpose, less control, and more stress, even when tasks became technically easier. Rebecca Hinds heads the Work AI Institute at Glean, previously founded the Work Innovation Lab at Asana, and will publish Your Best Meeting Ever in 2026. Robert I. Sutton is an organizational psychologist and Professor Emeritus at Stanford who has written multiple books, including The Friction Project (2024).

Read at Harvard Business Review