In the age of AI, presence becomes a competitive advantage

We are spending enormous amounts of attention on AI right now.

That makes sense. The pace of development is extraordinary. New tools, new use cases, new expectations. For many people, there is already a quiet pressure underneath it all: keep up, or fall behind.

I feel that pressure too.

There is real value in learning how to use AI well. It will change how we work, how we build, how we make decisions, and how much we are able to get done. It should have our attention.

But it should not get all of it.

Because while we are optimizing for speed, scale, and output, the fundamentals of good collaboration have not changed. In fact, they may be becoming more important. Trust. Presence. Attention. Context. The ability to understand another person beyond their role in the process.

I have been reminded of that repeatedly through customer work over the past year.

In one project, a colleague and I traveled for what was expected to be a difficult discussion around contract and commercial alignment. Before that, we had already had several conversations remotely. They had not gone particularly well. There were misunderstandings on both sides, confusion around intent, and growing frustration in the collaboration.

Then we sat down in the same room.

We stood around a whiteboard. Pointed at the same screen. Read each other’s reactions in real time. Adjusted the conversation as we went. What had felt like a two-day issue was resolved in a fraction of the time.

Not because the topic itself was simple, but because the people involved suddenly understood each other.

That is what is easy to miss in a digital-first way of working. A lot of friction is not caused by actual disagreement. It is caused by incomplete context. Tone lost in translation. Uncertainty left unspoken. Small misunderstandings that compound because no one quite sees the full picture.

In another project, we recently went into an in-person workshop with the expectation that there was too much distance between the parties to get through the full agenda. The assumption beforehand was that the discussion would be long, heavy, and difficult.

Instead, the opposite happened.

Once people were in the same room, looking at each other rather than thumbnails on a screen, the conversation moved quickly. Clarifications happened faster. Misunderstandings disappeared earlier. Decisions came with less friction.

Again, not because the subject matter changed, but because the medium did.

And that matters.

Because good collaboration is rarely only about the issue on paper. It is also about whether people trust each other’s intent. Whether they feel understood. Whether they believe the other side sees the pressures they are operating under.

That applies just as much in leadership as it does in customer work.

As a leader, it is easy to believe that clarity is enough. Set direction. Communicate expectations. Follow up. Use the tools well. But people do not only need clarity. They need presence. They need to feel that they are understood not just as functions in an operating model, but as people navigating incentives, trade-offs, ambitions, and constraints.

The same is true in customer relationships.

When you take time to build real rapport, collaboration changes. The other person stops being “the stakeholder,” “the project manager,” or “the customer.” You begin to understand what matters to them, what they are trying to protect, where they feel pressure, and what they need in order to trust the work. That understanding makes it far easier to solve the actual problems together.

This is why I think the human side of work deserves more attention right now, not less.

We are moving into a world where more communication will be drafted, summarized, automated, and optimized. More people will build AI agents to help them move faster. More workflows will become digital, asynchronous, and compressed.

That is not a bad thing. Much of it is genuinely useful.

But there is a danger in mistaking efficiency for effectiveness.

You can have the best tools, the best software, the best internal systems, and still struggle if you are not able to connect with the people you work with. You can automate an impressive amount of output and still fail to build trust. You can reduce time spent and still increase misunderstanding.

Human connection is not a soft add-on to real work.

In many situations, it is the work.

Especially when stakes are high. Especially when complexity is high. Especially when trust still needs to be built.

So yes, learn the tools. Keep up with AI. Experiment. Build better systems. Work smarter.

But also look up from the screen.

Be more present.

Be more human.