---
title: "What AI cannot do for us"
description: "With AI tools, one person does in an afternoon what used to take a team several days or weeks. I have been reflecting on what we actually cannot hand over – and what becomes the leader’s job as the tools do more and more of the work."
date: 2026-10-13
author: Merete N. Kristiansen
publisher: Kristiansen & Co
canonical: https://kristiansenco.no/en/insights/det-ki-ikke-kan-gj%C3%B8re-for-oss/
---

# What AI cannot do for us

These days we are all newly in love with the AI tools we have been given – ChatGPT, Copilot, Claude or others that can produce designs, prepare analyses and write reports. Tasks that used to take many hours and more kinds of expertise than we have ourselves. They have a capacity and a speed no colleague can match, and we feel we can deliver more and better – and perhaps even become more creative?

For my own part, I would never have managed to start a new company and launch it within two or three weeks without AI. Incorporation documents, articles of association, positioning, profile, website and communication plan – all of it was developed with AI tools. I had a little help (two half-days with my son) on design and the technical side, to get the website the way I wanted it and get it published. Apart from that it has been me, a PC and a subscription to Claude.

I remember how excited I was when we finally launched the website for SpareBank 1 Nord-Norge in the late 1990s. I worked in the marketing department, and we were a small internal team working on the design and solution for the bank's first website, with developers and an advertising agency for the technical and creative work. Back then we had one – 1 – PC in the office connected to "the big internet", and it stood in the common area. Our work PCs were connected to the bank's systems and, for security reasons, were not to go online. It sounds primitive today, but I think we were roughly in the same place with the internet then as we are with AI now. Just as excited, just as certain that this was going to change the way we worked. And it did.

But what the internet did not do was remove the need for a team that worked. We were still a handful of people who had to agree on what the website should be, who did what, and what to prioritise when we could not do everything. That was what decided whether it turned out well, not the technology.

The same applies now. It would not have become my company and my profile if I had not had a clear sense of what I can actually do, and how I want to come across. That is based on who I am and on my experience of working with people over many years. The tool could help me write, but it did not know what to write.

So here is the point. AI does the tasks faster, and often better than we would have managed alone. But it is still people who have to assess, decide and deliver – often in different areas than before. And people are people: they have children, they have parents who are getting old, they fall ill, they create conflicts, they dislike their boss, they cannot bring themselves to speak up. None of these things has been given a tool. As the tools take on more of the tasks, the leader’s job becomes less about getting them done, and more about getting the people around the table to work together. Leadership does not become less important with AI. It becomes a larger part of the job.

What I have done myself as a leader is not sophisticated. I have kept an open door – at the office, by phone, by message – and been available when people needed it, whether it concerned something at work or something at home. The result is that they have dared to come, with small things and large. We have not solved everything. But the fact that I was there has meant that people have been happier at work, achieved more and grown. It took time. And that was the time that was worth the most.

As the tools do more of the work, it is the team that makes the difference. The most important decision a leader makes is then who should be on it – and how they should work together. That is what I work on now, including through leadership recruitment and leadership development. And the door is still open – it just has a few more channels now.