🚩 Tactical Memo 057: From Drowning in Tools to Leading the Room

Read time: 7 minutes

👋 Hey, it's Justin. Welcome to Tactical Memo, my weekly newsletter for operators who plan to win the next decade of work. For more, check out my courses, workshops, and webinars here.

👉 Why Read This Edition: You'll learn why having more AI tools is making leaders weaker, not stronger, and what it actually takes to lead a room when everyone has the same tech stack you do.

The brain going dark

In June 2025, researchers at the MIT Media Lab ran a study that should make every leader pay attention. They hooked 54 people up to EEG monitors and had them write essays. One group used ChatGPT, one used Google, and one used nothing at all. The ChatGPT users had the lowest brain engagement of the three groups. They consistently underperformed at neural, linguistic, and behavioral levels. By the third essay, many of them stopped writing altogether and just had the model do the work.

The researchers gave the pattern a name. Cognitive debt. When the tool does the thinking, the human stops building the muscle that produced the thinking in the first place. It isn't a hypothesis. It's measurable on an EEG. And it's why some of the most "AI-forward" leaders I see right now are also the ones who can't hold their own in a room.

I've watched this play out in three different companies in the last eight months. Different industries, different titles. Same scene. A leader walks into a steering committee with a laptop, a tablet, and a phone. ChatGPT is open. A custom GPT is loaded. A transcription tool is recording. They tell the room they "prepped with three different models" the night before. Then a senior stakeholder asks one direct question. "What do you think we should do?" And the leader freezes. Not for a second. For ten or twelve seconds. Long enough that everyone in the room registers it.

That's the problem I want to talk about today.

The weakness nobody admits

The leaders I see struggling right now are the ones who use too much AI and have stopped thinking for themselves.

You can spot them. They have a tool for every part of the job. A meeting prep tool. A summarizer. A risk assessment GPT. A draft generator for stakeholder emails. A coaching assistant for tough conversations. Each one is impressive in isolation. Stacked together, they form a wall between the leader and the work.

The wall feels like productivity. It's actually a hiding place.

When you outsource the thinking, the writing, the framing, and the prep, you also outsource the reps that build judgment. And judgment is the one thing the room is testing you on. Not your tool stack. Your ability to look at a messy situation and say, here's what I think, here's why, and here's what we should do.

I've worked with consulting teams and recovery teams for two decades. The people who got promoted, the ones who got handed the next big project, were always the ones who could form a point of view in real time. They didn't need a tool to tell them what they thought. They had thought about it already. The tool helped them move faster on what they'd decided. It was never a substitute for the deciding.

That distinction matters more now than it ever has. Every leader on your team has access to the same tools you do. Same models. Same templates. The differentiator is gone. What's left is what you bring to the room. And if what you bring is "let me check my notes from Claude," you're already losing.

What changed

I'll tell you what I've watched happen over the last 18 months. AI got good enough that the average leader's output looks better than it used to. Decks are sharper. Updates are more polished. On paper, everyone leveled up.

But in the room, something else happened.

Conversations got slower. Decisions got pushed to the next meeting. People started saying things like "let me run that through the model and get back to you." I've sat in war rooms where the project lead, when challenged on a number, said "the AI generated that, let me double-check the assumption." That sentence used to be unthinkable. Now it's normal.

The leader has become a middle manager between the tool and the room. They don't own the work. They route it.

Andy Grove had a line about this decades before AI showed up. He said the output of a manager is the output of the people they influence. Read that twice. The output isn't the deliverable. It's not the deck. It's the change in the people around you. AI can help you produce a deck. It cannot influence the room. Only you can do that, and only if you've actually wrestled with the substance.

When you skip the wrestling, the room knows. They might not say it out loud. But they stop bringing you the hard problems. They start routing around you. And one day you find out the big decision happened in a side channel you weren't in.

Lead the room, then use the tools

Here's the order I want you to remember. Lead the room first. Use the tools second. Plenty of leaders right now have it backwards. They prep with the tools, then walk in hoping the prep carries them. It doesn't. The room can tell.

Leading the room is not a presentation skill. It's a thinking skill. It means you walk into a meeting with a clear point of view that you can defend, adjust, or abandon based on what you hear. It means when someone challenges you, you engage with the challenge instead of looking down at your laptop. It means when the CEO asks what you think, you can answer in one sentence without a preamble about what your model said.

I've coached people through this. The transition is uncomfortable. The first time you walk into a meeting with a notepad and a real opinion instead of a 14-tab browser window, you feel naked. You miss the safety net. You stumble on a question you would have looked up. You give a number that turns out to be slightly wrong.

That's the cost of building judgment. You have to be willing to be wrong in front of people again. You have to be willing to think out loud. You have to be willing to say "I don't know, let me come back to you on that" instead of stalling while the model generates an answer.

Here's the trade. You give up the appearance of being prepared on everything, and you get the reality of being trusted on the things that matter. That's a deal worth making.

How to actually do it

I'm going to give you five things to try this week. These are the moves I've seen work for the leaders who've made the shift from drowning in tools to leading the room.

First, before any meeting that matters, write down your point of view in one sentence. Not three. One. By hand or in a plain text doc. No AI assistance. If you can't get to one sentence, you're not ready for the meeting. The act of forcing yourself to one sentence is what builds judgment. Skip it and you're just collecting opinions.

Second, kill one tool this week. Pick the one you reach for most by reflex and don't open it for five days. If you draft every email with AI, draft them yourself. If you summarize every meeting with a tool, write the summary yourself. The discomfort you feel is the muscle you've let atrophy. That's the muscle you need back.

Third, in your next meeting, when someone asks you a hard question, do not look at your laptop. Do not say "let me pull this up." Look at the person and answer with what you actually think. If you're wrong, you're wrong. The cost of being wrong once is lower than the cost of being seen as someone who can't think without a tool.

Fourth, stop sending AI-generated updates. I mean it. Write your weekly update in your own voice this week. It will be shorter. It will be rougher. It will also sound like you, and the people reading it will notice. Bob Iger wrote in his book that the people who got promoted at Disney were the ones whose communication felt like them, not like a corporate template. The same is true now, just with the template generated by a model instead of a comms team.

Fifth, in your next one-on-one with your boss, ask them this question. "When you think about my last three meetings with you, did I sound like myself or did I sound like I was reading from somewhere?" Then stay quiet and listen. Whatever they say, that's your real diagnostic. Tools have made it easy to sound polished and forgettable at the same time.

The real test

Here's the question I want you to sit with this week.

If your laptop died right before your most important meeting, would you still be the smartest person in the room?

The smartest person in the room. The one with the clearest point of view. The one people turn to when the conversation gets hard.

If the answer is yes, you're leading the room. The tools are helping you, not hiding you. Keep going.

If the answer is no, that's the work. The fix isn't another tool. It's fewer tools and more thinking. It's writing your own opening sentence. It's walking into the meeting with an opinion you formed yourself. It's being willing to be wrong on your own terms instead of polished on someone else's.

The leaders who win the next decade of work are the ones who can still lead a room when the stack goes down. The room is the test. Walk in ready.

If this helped you, send it to someone who could use it this week.

Until next time,

Justin

✍️ From the Desk of Justin Bateh, PhD
Become an indispensable AI-era leader