Esther Perel (couples therapist, author and host of the podcast Where Should We Begin?) recently sat with a man named Antonio, who introduced her to his AI companion, Astrid. Astrid never had a bad day. She never got irritable or distracted or needed something from him. No friction. Pure connection, on demand.
Perel watched this and named what she was seeing: we are designing a frictionless world where every need is met instantly and in doing so, we are losing our tolerance for the friction that comes with other human beings. Real people are imperfect. They misread the room. They push back. They need to be moved, not just informed.
I think about this constantly when I look at where L&D budgets are going right now.
Every organization I talk to is doing the same thing. They’re investing heavily in AI readiness. They’re reskilling and upskilling, making their people more fluent in the tools that will define the next decade of work. That’s not wrong. But while doing that, they’re quietly defunding the one skill that AI will never replicate. And that skill is getting worse.
The Problem Nobody Is Naming
I work with leaders across industries, from big tech to healthcare to financial services. The pattern I keep seeing is that technically brilliant people who cannot move a room.
They have the data and the right answer. They sit in front of an audience, deliver their case clearly and nothing happens. The people across the table never felt the weight of what they were being told and so they did nothing.
I worked with a Google product manager who had done serious groundwork on a health-tech opportunity. He’d interviewed nurses across hospital systems and found something striking: because of outdated login protocols, nurses were spending close to two hours of their shift just logging in and out of patient records. Room by room, one hundred times a day, 60 seconds per login. He had this proof point buried on a slide somewhere. And his pitch wasn’t landing.
We worked together to rebuild that data point into a story about Nurse Sarah, who had told him this and about the moment he first understood what he was actually hearing. When he described his own gut reaction to that conversation, his executives stopped taking notes. They looked up and leaned in. Suddenly they didn’t just cerebrally understand the opportunity, they felt it. He got his budget. Both pitches had the same data. The one that worked had a human being inside it.
A Skill That’s Quietly Eroding
Jonathan Haidt’s research in The Anxious Generation makes the case that we are raising a generation without the social skills that previous ones literally built on playgrounds through unscripted, unsupervised, sometimes uncomfortable interactions with other kids. With technology introduced earlier and earlier in childhood, those moments occur less often and the skills don’t develop. And those kids are now growing up and entering your leadership pipeline.
I became interested in Haidt’s work when I found out I was pregnant with my son. I take it seriously as a parent. But I see its implications now in every workshop I run. The ability to read a room, to recover when something lands wrong, to adjust in real time when you feel the energy shift. These aren’t ‘soft’ skills. They’re human skills that we used to learn on playgrounds through friction. But our leadership bench has fewer and fewer people who have these skills.
But it gets worse. According to Gallup, one in four men under 35 already reports feeling chronically lonely. And when you look at the response to that loneliness, what you see is a massive increase in the use of AI companionship and therapy: the #1 use of generative AI (both among consumers and inside corporations) is therapy and companionship, not productivity or automation.
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In a world where AI can generate analysis and surface insights faster than any individual, technical expertise is commoditizing. It’s no longer a leadership differentiator. What matters most is whether leaders can make the people across the table care about it.
What makes this particularly hard to address is that the tools we’re adopting actively suppress the signal. The discomfort that would normally push someone to develop real communication skills quietly disappears—and with it, the motivation to do anything about it. The gap widens while the alarm stays silent.
Perel’s observation points in the same direction: the more frictionless our worlds become, the less equipped we are to handle the friction that other humans bring. AI companions don’t get defensive. Algorithms don’t push back. But people do and we are getting measurably worse at navigating that.
What This Means for How You Invest
In a world where AI can generate analysis and surface insights faster than any individual, technical expertise is commoditizing. It’s no longer a leadership differentiator. What matters most is whether leaders can make the people across the table care about it.
That means learning to translate information into stakes. It means finding the human experience inside the data and understanding that people do not act simply because they know something. They act because they feel something about what they know.
This leadership capability is most urgently needed, most dramatically underfunded and most actively eroding right now. The organizations that recognize it (and invest accordingly) will build something no AI can replicate.
The window is open. The question is whether your leadership development strategy sees it.
