The New Tired for AI Leaders: A New Kind of Burnout is Coming

You're a leader. Your calendar is completely full. You have demands increasing every day, expectations increasing every moment, and more and more people are asking more of you, expecting more of you. Increasing your KPIs, and this damn AI thing that you know is important, but you feel guilty that you haven't spent any time with it. Or better yet, you secretly don't want anybody to know that you just don't care about it because it's so annoying, it's frustrating, it's getting in the way, it's just another thing to the list. But you know, it's unavoidable. It's changing everything. It's sort of creeping in, getting closer and closer to your inner circle. It's making you more and more inside uncomfortable, and you know you have to do something about it. And so the question is, as a leader, What do you do? What's the first thing that you do? And this is a private question. This is a question you're only going to ask yourself. You're not going to ask anyone else, because if you ask anyone else, then you're showing people that you don't know what to do. We can't do that. We're a leader. You're a leader. You can't show you don't have the answer. You can't show you're not certain. You can't show that you don't have a plan, a strategy, that your pipeline is full of AI opportunities. But it makes you even more insecure. What do you do? Let me share with you a dream I had. And the dream with, with, with a person who was very influential, let's say, and they asked me a profound question. Now that AI is here and you could achieve anything you want, you could There's nothing to hold you back. No past, no parents, no trauma, no insecurities, no kids, no family, no guilt, no bad memories. Literally, the future is yours. What do you want to do? That question was so big in my dream that I woke up. 'Cause I said, if I look at that, if I look at my future, it's such an open, limitless potential without any inhibitions holding me down, without any inner securities holding me back, but just infinite possibilities. What would I do? I struggle just to grasp that concept. And you as a leader with AI, it's the same question. What do you want to do without any inhibitions, anything holding you back, without anything stopping you, without any beat tugging at you, without the people come knocking on your door or emailing you or sending you Slack messages or team messages expecting all these things, without the all the calendar meetings back to back to back, the short lunches, no lunches, too many coffees, not enough coffees. What would you do? The way I'm going to handle it, the way I handle this question is take a breath and say, wow, that's incredible. And then I gotta think, as a leader, I have to take care of people. I also have to take care of AI. I mean, AI is going to be a new employee, or is a new employee, or new type, type of employee. It hasn't really been formed yet. I haven't figured it out yet. But I have to take care of my people because I lead people as a leader. And people today are becoming burnt out in a new way. And as a leader, you should be aware that a normal— or you may be burnt out as well. Let me give you an example, a very specific example, and I'll put it back to myself and I'll tie everything together. I use AI all day long, everything I do. And then typical work environment, which does not include AI, pre-AI days, you have, you get 10 meetings all day long. People expect decisions from you, but first you have discussions about it. People present on PowerPoint or something, their presentation, their ideas. You go around the table, Uh, you have a Teams call, people are interjecting, things like that, and decisions are made by the end of the meeting. But decisions are made by the end of the meeting. The meeting may last a half hour, typically an hour, sometimes 2 hours. There's tons of people who gotta put in their input and you have to mix and match and things like that. But you come to a conclusion typically at the end of the meeting. And if it's a waste of time meeting, it's the conclusion to have another meeting. But we're not gonna touch that. But say you have a conclusion pretty much at the end of every meeting, and every meeting's a half hour or an hour. Let's do an hour for simple math. At the end of an 8-hour workday, you made 8 decisions. Now I'm not, I know you're making many more, but let's simplify the math. You made 8 decisions. Today with AI, what I'm experiencing, 'cause I use AI all the time, I have AI agents doing many things at the same time. So I have 5, 10, you know, AI agents all working at the same time. Now, the people you're leading, if you're leading, for example, developers or you're leading like people like me, I may launch even more AI agents simultaneously, giving each individual one their own task, their own project to work on. But because AI works so quickly, remember, is able to read a million pages per second. And not just read it, but read it, understand it, connect page 972 to page 365, the second word to the third paragraph, the fifth word of this paragraph, tie it all together. It understands the full meaning and is doing this at a million pages a second, is able to look at all the historical information in the world, everything, so on and so on. So is the AI the task I give it, it will complete that task in a few seconds to a few minutes. If the task is very difficult, which would probably take a team of people a week, it would do in about 3, 4 minutes, maybe 5, maybe let's say 15 minutes to round it out. That means if I'm running 10 different AI or AI agents, which are all spawning their own group of teams of people, say if I run 10 of them, that means every 15 minutes I have to answer 10 questions that each are leading to yes, go left, go right, do this, invest, don't invest. Yes, make that phone call. No, we don't want to do that in our strategy. That conflicts with this, that conflicts with that. And that's just with one AI agent and I have 10 of them running down. Now I'm simplifying the math. That means I'm making decisions all the time. Developers and other people who are really crafty with this have 20. I know some people who do 50 AI agents simultaneously. My point is, is that they and you, when you start being a leader of AI with people, you are gonna be a decision-making machine. And people today who are running these AI agents like myself and others, There's a new form of burnout because after, I think the period's about 5 hours, you're mentally exhausted because you have been making decisions all day long. Not like the old school way, it's like, I'm tired, I'm in meetings, I've been making decisions all day, but that's after listening to people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and decision time. Now it's, Decision, decision, decision. Now decision from this particular project and then the next second a completely different project you got going. Remember the AI's all working on different projects, different countries, different clients, different situations, different governance, different rules, different regulations. Some on sales, some are marketing, some are business, some are strategy. Your head has gotta flip every second. Decision on something completely different. Decision on something completely different. Decision. On something completely different all day long. It is a new form of burnout. And you wanna be this leader. You have to lead people who are doing what you want them to do. You want them to maximize their output where they are, and they are, but they are becoming decision-making engines. You are becoming decision-making engines, right? All these decisions, all these decisions. How do you lead? Where's your future? A limitless future. Where do you wrap this whole thing up into? It's you. You're gonna have to take care of you. This is going to expose those hidden corners of your mind. Those hidden pieces of your personality and your character are going to come out because when your mind, when the human mind has to make decisions all the time. And I'm, I'm saying all the time, I'm talking about every minute you're making a decision. It is a point in which the mind is not made to do that. Even in military combat, when you're in the thick of it, yeah, you're making decisions all the time, right? The adrenaline kicks in, life-saving situation. You have to help yourself. You have to help your troops. You know, all that. You're in the thick of it, but it will come to an end. This is your new 9 to 5. This is your new reality. Very different. What do you want to do? How are you gonna handle that? You handle that by handling yourself, by you prioritizing yourself. This is where mental health goes through the roof. This is where physical health is incredibly important. And this is where really to be the greatest leader ever. Soft skills, seeing people, taking care of people. Because you now know what's coming. You're going to have a whole new form of burnout in the office, or worse, if people are working virtually, you are not going to even see that they're burned out. So the greatest leaders are people who are taking care of their people and who take care of themselves, and lead by teaching how to take care of themselves, lead by telling them, this is how you work, in a situation where you're making decisions all the time. This is how you set them up. We need to start teaching people how to be the best version themselves with AI, and then you are that great leader. But you got to take care of you first. I'm telling you now, this is what's coming because I'm in the middle of it now. And at the end of the day, I'm tired. It's a totally different type of tired. I've not seen and I've felt this type of tired before. And the tiredness comes from So many decisions. I thought it was a lot before. The problem with before was a lot of sitting in meetings and then decisions. This one is decisions, decisions, decisions, decisions, decisions. Ah, hundreds a day. Now we're getting a lot of done, advancing faster than ever before, doing incredible things, but different type of target. I'm letting you know where you're going. I'm letting you know where your office is going. I'm telling you now what your culture is about to change into. You as a leader have to take care of you. You have to take care of your people. And then they also in kind will take care of you. AI is phenomenal., but it's gonna just like a root of a tree is gonna dig itself into a culture of your company. But because you're ahead of the game and you see this coming, you now could prepare. I just said in the last podcast, embrace the suck. It's all gonna change. This is gonna be really difficult, but now you know what's coming because I've been sacrificing my mental health. Let you to experience it so you know this is weird, this is different. But you're, you're gonna be a great leader. You are a great leader. You now know what's coming, so let's plan for it. Let's prepare for it by taking care of you, by knowing that things are going to be faster, quicker, and just embrace the suck. It's just the way things are gonna be. Take the time for it. Prepare your people for it. Prepare your organization for it. We are gonna do things faster, quicker, but we're gonna do it systematically. We're gonna keep, we're gonna have new, uh, let's call it processes and procedures that keep everything gated, that we're not making decisions so quickly that the 10 human beings on our team who each are using, once again, 10 AIs, that they probably will be using 20. They're making 100 decisions every 10 minutes. That's a lot. And that means at the end of the hour, 100 times 6, 600 decisions rounded out, because they're probably doing more, 1,000 decisions an hour in your team that are gonna affect your company. At the end of, end of a workday, probably close to 10,000 decisions just in your group, not in the entire corporation. Just in your group. You need to have the right governance inside your group to help them so that everybody's going down the right path and that your company's going where you want the company to go. What decisions, what progress, what clients, what strategy— that's probably good for another podcast— what strategy can you build when you're making 10,000 decisions a day, you're gonna get there really fast. Welcome to the world of being an AI leader in an AI culture. It's not crazy, it's super exciting. Embrace the suck. You got this. I'm Thomas Anglero. This is Clarity at the Top podcast. Subscribe to the newsletter, and until next time.