Keep people in the decision.
Explore where AI can help and where human judgment, empathy, and accountability remain essential.
Walking into 30 Rock felt surreal. On October 5, I joined NBC News live to talk about AI and the agency we have as it becomes part of our lives.
The conversation was a reminder that people need a place to begin. You do not need to understand every technical detail of an AI system to ask what it is doing, whose expertise matters, or who is responsible for the result.
For those of us leading teams and organizations, those questions carry an additional responsibility. Our choices help determine whether other people have a meaningful say in how their work changes.
This is the leadership reflection I carried away from that visit. The workplace examples below extend the PLOT questions into team decisions; they are not a transcript of the broadcast.
Power: Who has decision rights as AI takes on more work?
An AI-assisted workflow can change who influences a decision before anyone formally changes the decision rights. A summary can determine what gets discussed. A recommendation can narrow the options a manager considers. A draft can become the default simply because it already exists.
Leaders can make those choices visible. In one workflow, name what AI is helping with, where its output enters a decision, and which decisions require human judgment. Then ask whether people have the time, information, and authority to disagree with the output. A human review step matters only if someone can actually exercise it.
Listening: What expertise do we need to consult?
The people who understand a process are not always the people choosing its new tools. Someone doing the work may know why an apparent exception exists, which relationship makes a handoff possible, or what gets lost when a complicated situation becomes a neat summary.
Bring that knowledge into the design early. For a proposed AI-assisted customer response, for example, frontline colleagues can help identify which cases need a conversation, what context is routinely missing, and when a response should be escalated. Their expertise can shape both the workflow and the definition of success.
Ownership: Who owns the outcomes of AI-produced work?
When several people and systems contribute to an output, responsibility can become difficult to locate. Who reviews it? Who can pause the process? Who responds when someone challenges the result?
Those answers should be clear before the work reaches a customer, colleague, or decision-maker. Name the person accountable for the outcome and make sure that person has the authority and support to fulfill that responsibility. Accountability becomes difficult to sustain when someone is expected to sign off on work they cannot meaningfully inspect.
Truth: What do we need to validate?
A polished answer can travel quickly through an organization. Leaders can help teams establish what must be checked before that answer becomes the basis for action.
The checks should reflect the consequences of being wrong. A first draft of an internal agenda and an analysis supporting a consequential staffing decision need different levels of scrutiny. Identify the claims, assumptions, and missing context that matter. Agree on the evidence needed, who will check it, and what happens when uncertainty remains.
A conversation to have with your team
Choose one workflow where your team already uses AI. Ask everyone involved to answer the four PLOT questions independently, then compare their answers.
Where do people disagree about what AI is deciding? Whose expertise has been missing? Is the person who owns the outcome able to review and challenge the work? What does the team assume someone else is checking?
Choose one gap to address. Make a decision right clearer, bring an overlooked colleague into the process, or establish a review that people have time to perform. Return to the workflow and see whether the change helps.
I left NBC grateful for the chance to bring these questions into a wider conversation. For leaders, keeping our agency also means creating conditions in which the people around us can use theirs.
