AI won’t lead. You will.

AI won’t lead. You will.
I woke up hungry thinking about AI and leadership.
Maybe it was the chicken nugget story.
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A fast-food chain tested voice AI in its drive-throughs.
Two friends ordered nuggets. The system kept multiplying the order. 100. 200. 260 nuggets.
Another customer asked for ice cream. The system added bacon.
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The trial was cancelled.
Not because AI is evil.
Because no one stepped in.
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A TEDx talk by my friend Oliver Aust opened with this story.
He made the audience laugh. Then he made them think. Same here.

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This isn’t a tech failure story.
It is a leadership failure story.
When we let systems run without oversight, we abdicate responsibility.

Right now many companies are stuck in one of two traps.
They fear AI and avoid it.
Or they worship AI and overuse it. Both paths lead to the same place.
Irrelevance.

Leaders do something else. They use AI to improve their thinking, not replace it.
They deploy technology to compete better in their market.
They do not try to compete with the technology itself.
And they communicate clearly enough that the whole company knows where judgment lives.
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The nugget fiasco happened because no human was in the loop.
No one asked the simplest question. Does this make sense? That is your job.
AI can process, predict, and optimize. It cannot set standards, hold tension, or carry trust. People do that.

Use this as a quick check the next time you roll out an AI system:

• Purpose: what outcome are we trying to improve, and how will we measure it beyond raw efficiency
• Guardrails: where must a human review, override, or pause the system
• Escalation: who is accountable when something looks off, and how fast do they hear about it
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If you answer those three with clarity, you get the upside of AI without the chaos.
You build an organization that gets faster and smarter while staying human.
So ask yourself today. Are you using AI to think better, or are you letting it think for you?

tldr: the drive-through disaster was not about bad AI.
It was about missing leadership. Keep a human in the loop, define guardrails, and make judgment visible.
AI can help you win. It just cannot lead.