​The Best AI-Augmented Executive Is Not The Most Automated One

Anna Drobakha, Global Digital Business & AI Transformation Director at Groupe SEB.

​At a recent executive roundtable, I put a simple question on the screen: As AI can do more, what must remain human? It shifted the whole conversation. Most of the executive AI debate still centers on capability: Can AI do this? Increasingly, yes. AI can research, synthesize, draft, model scenarios and absorb work that used to require meaningful executive capacity. The more consequential question is different: Should AI do this, and what happens to us when it does?

There’s a temptation to treat automation as a proxy for maturity. Automate 40% of your work and you look more advanced than someone at 20%. I’m not convinced. The best AI-augmented executive may not be the most automated one. What matters is what we delegate, what we augment, what we keep practicing ourselves and whether our distinctly human capabilities get stronger through working with AI or quietly atrophy. I think about this across four dimensions: head, hands, heart and soul.

Head: Augment Intelligence, Don’t Outsource Judgment

AI is becoming a genuine extension of the executive mind. It helps challenging assumptions, synthesize complexity and surface scenarios we’d otherwise miss. That can sharpen strategic thinking. But there’s a paradox: The more AI participates in our thinking, the more deliberately we need to protect the experiences that build judgment in the first place.

Judgment is built by deciding, owning the consequence and discovering where our assumptions were wrong. This isn’t just intuition; a 2025 study of 666 professionals found that frequent AI reliance is linked to measurably lower critical-thinking performance, mediated by exactly this kind of cognitive offloading. If AI frames every question and recommends every course of action, an executive can get very good at reviewing AI’s thinking while getting less practice producing their own.