AI is about to make being the smartest person in the room a lot less interesting. It can already remember more than you, process more information than you, and produce an incredibly convincing argument in just seconds. Which leaves us with a more interesting question. What happens when the data says one thing? Everyone around the table agrees with it. And something in you goes, hang on, we're missing something here. I think our ability to trust that voice is about to matter more than ever. Women at this point in history are already having a confidence and self-trust wobble. We have decades of looking outside ourselves for everything. Chasing gold stars, looking for validation, deferring to the opinions of others, so much self-doubt and asking ourselves questions of man, am I doing this right? I don't want to make a mistake. AI is arriving right now, directly, bang, in the middle of that vulnerability. It's become another very convincing and authoritative voice telling us what to do. Available 24-7. It's polished, it's certain, and it seems to be backed with more and more proof and information. There is a risk that AI becomes the next authority we start deferring to. Now let's just be clear. I love AI. I use it all the time, but it is also like intellectual crack. You ask a question, it fires straight back at you. It challenges you, it pushes you, it gives you answers, it opens up new perspective, it keeps you moving, and you don't need to do small talk. That speed can be amazing, but it keeps us firmly in our heads. It can be harder to hear that little whisper that goes, hang on, there's there's something else here. What tends to happen, regardless of which AI platform you're using, is the answers usually come out really compelling and really confident. I'm going to give you a very, very ironic example of how this can play out. And this has played out while I was crafting this episode.

Most of my podcast episodes are born on a dog walk. And I open up AI and I blurt out here's what I want to say, here are the key points, here's what I want to cover, here's how I want to get out of it. And then AI just helps me shape it into something. So it's a little more cohesive. Now I got the first draft back of this episode, midway up at the oval. And then my brain just went, uh, nah, this there's a there's something missing here. And I went back and said, something's missing. I think it's around this. And I got pushback. It was like, that could be, but no, like this is a really solid episode. And it can be really easy to go, oh yeah, okay, you're you're more certain. But there was something still niggling. And I pushed again, and I'll tell you what it is in a little moment. And then it went, oh, yeah, you're right. We do. So we have to be really, really, really careful about what AI is doing to us.

Now, AI for cognitive load, outsource the crap out of it, help it remind you of things, synthesize things, do the grunt work, organize stuff, produce stuff. My gosh, we have spent decades being a human copilot. There is an opportunity to actually get someone else to do some of this for us. And it is becoming increasingly less valuable to be a person who can just hold everything in your head. You are going to be outsmarted and outspeeded very soon. So, what skill or muscle is actually now becoming the most valuable one? And this is something that women have had in spades for generations, but have never actually valued. That is judgment. Judgment is what you are actually now about to be paid for. So what is judgment? It's more than just knowledge or information or having enough experience. Because very, very soon, depending on your field, if not already, AI has more information, more data, more stuff than any individual human could possibly hold. But that human judgment we have is thousands of signals being processed beneath our conscious awareness by our subconscious mind. It's being in that meeting and knowing that while Simon is nodding and saying all the right things, his eyes started a bit off to the left. And when you saw what he did with his hand, you're like, mmm, his he's not with me on this. There's no spreadsheet or traffic light column in the risk register that says Simon's eyes indicate that he is not with you. Yet. Our body knows before our language can catch up. There's this tiny hesitation. There's a, oh, so-and-so's a bit off today, and I'm not quite sure what it is, or they've said all the right ah, it's looking for the thing between the lines. We often can't explain it. It's this beautiful brain and body connecting the dots before our conscious mind has built the argument. It's knowing without yet knowing why.

And this is where a likely perfectionist, this becomes really interesting. Because as a high achiever and a perfectionist, you've probably been trained to speak when you can back yourself. You need a solid argument, you need logic, you want to have evidence ready, you want to answer objections, you don't want to look stupid, but judgment usually arrives before certainty. And in the time you're waiting to check more, get more information, get that perfect argument, well, the moment's past. You've missed it. Do you remember earlier I was saying there was a piece that AI missed? Yeah. It was this what I've just shared with you. Something that it wouldn't have known. But my judgment knew better. And then someone else comes and says blah, blah, blah, which is exactly what you were thinking. And they're now getting all this credit for being the brave one to say the thing that was actually sitting as the elephant in the room. Meanwhile, you felt it, you sensed it, you thought, ah, we need to do something about this. And then you swallowed your words. AI is going to make this even harder. Because everyone is now going to arrive with really polished rationale. They're going to have their data, their frameworks, their arguments. Somebody else's certainty is usually triggering enough for us. But now that extra level of certainty is manufactured in seconds. But we have to ensure now how we communicate these little nudges, these little pieces of wisdom, this judgment that we have without waiting for a beautifully constructed argument. Because often our intuition can feel a bit flimsy. And so the temptation is well, just shut up until I've got something equally impressive as that person that's got that big dialed thing over here. But what if this is exactly the muscle we need to build right now?

Learning to speak before we have complete certainty and learning to trust the judgment that you have coming through. It's having the courage to say in a meeting where everybody else is taken off and go, hang on, can we just stay here for a minute? There's something else I want to explore. Or something about this doesn't sit right with me. Can you hold yourself through a situation where you can say, I don't have the answer yet, but I don't think we're asking the right question. Can you build enough confidence in yourself where your I don't know yet can sit alongside somebody else saying, I don't agree? Now let's be clear, it doesn't mean that gut automatically wins. And I have all my lawyers and accountants going, Joe, the numbers never lie. Okay, okay, okay. But it doesn't also mean that the evidence that you may have is always relevant. Can we not find a world where that information, that nudge that we're getting actually becomes something that we value enough to investigate? And your gut instinct is going to be wrong sometimes. That's okay. You go, great, I learned something from it. I've been overridden by the data. Okay. It just means I've brought a different form of intelligence to the table. And I would like to marry this intelligence I have about where we're going and what this means with your data. Great. But very often, that tiny nickel that you have that is eating you alive inside that meeting reveals the thing that everyone else missed. I don't want you to override that signal, which is your judgment, which is your deep inner wisdom, just because something or someone else sounded more authoritative. The old pattern many of us tend to have is that the more qualified person or the louder person or the expert in the room, we automatically defer to them and assume they know better. Hello imposter syndrome. But AI can become that authority on steroids if we are not careful. We want to make sure we don't start subscribing to this view of who am I to challenge something that knows more than me? But we're going to find, especially in this world that's coming for us, maybe knowing more isn't what we're being paid for. We are being paid for our humanity, for our judgment, our discernment, the ability to read humans and look at the thing going on under the thing. Emotional intelligence, asking the better question and having this little sense for something's missing here. You get to be the humanity in a room when data points, frameworks, and efficiencies are often the only ones at the table. Now, can you imagine a meeting where everyone else's AI-backed analysis and it says X and it commercially makes sense and the numbers stack up, but you're sitting there going, ah, this just it feels like what happened to the customer in all this? Someone has to have the guts to stand up and say, before we do this, and I'm not saying we can't, I think we might be missing something. You know what that judgment has to come hand in hand with? You're going to have to learn to sit in discomfort when the room doesn't immediately agree with you. And hello, a generation of people pleasers who that is the worst possible thing you could possibly think of. But this is going to become an increasingly valuable leadership capacity. So you've got to have access to that inner wisdom. You need to have the courage to sit in the discomfort of speaking that judgment and bringing it into the room.

But your judgment needs reps. Every time we feel something in our bodies and then ask AI what it thinks, there's a risk that we start overriding that signal before we've even heard it. We have to give ourselves the time and space rather than just firing things off. The more I have learned into AI, the more I have to actually take a step back and give my intuition, my wisdom, my judgment the chance to come forward. I have to notice that reaction to AI, to a proposal before I automatically accept it. I've got to let my head catch up with my body because my body's faster. My judgment is faster. I just have to slow down for a fraction of a second. We have spent so many years being rewarded for our intellect, for holding everything, for being right, for remembering, for being the one who picks up the slap. AI is going to touch wood, be able to carry more of that cognitive burden. Brilliant. But we now have this once-in-a-generation opportunity to develop parts of intelligence that we've historically struggled to quantify. Inner wisdom, your judgment, your discernment, your voice. So I really encourage you, don't accidentally hand over the part we're increasingly being paid for in the name of fitting in with the rest of the room. Because when everyone else has access to an intelligent answer, will you trust yourself enough to be the one person in the room who says, hang on, I think we're missing something here.

OUTRO: Thanks for joining me today. If this episode resonated, share it with a woman who needs to hear it. And if you want to be part of the Ripple Effect, leaving a review helps it reach the women it's meant for. I'll see you next time.