There is a specific kind of professional vertigo that hits when you realize the ladder you’ve been climbing for two decades is leaning against a wall that is currently being demolished.
I’ve spent 15 years building a career that felt “safe.” From the analytical rigour of McKinsey to the operational scale of Amazon, and now leading at Atlassian, the path was always about moving up. And in our world, moving up almost always meant moving away. Away from the code, away from the raw data, and into the comfortable, high-level world of “strategic oversight.”
We were taught that our value was in our “judgment”—the ability to sit back, look at a dashboard, and say “yes” or “no.” We became hands-off managers, proud of our ability to lead via proxy.
But a few months ago, I felt the ground shift. I realized that in the age of Agentic AI, the “hands-off manager” is a role with a rapidly approaching expiration date.
The 3.5-Year-Old Mirror
The most profound realization didn’t come from a tech whitepaper, but from watching my 3.5-year-old play.
In my generation, “success” was a linear game of prestige. You fought for the IIT seat, you grinded for the top-10 MBA, and you collected the “Blue Chip” brands on your resume like badges of armor. We treated information as something to be hoarded and education as a hurdle to be cleared.
But as I look at my son, I realize that by the time he’s ten, information will be as free and ubiquitous as oxygen. The “Information Moat” I spent my life building is gone.
I’ve had to stop and ask myself: What am I actually preparing him for? If a machine can pass the bar exam or write a marketing plan in seconds, the old “brand” of a school matters less than ever. I’m starting to believe that schooling, as we know it, is undergoing a total identity crisis.
What will hold true? The emotional side. The ability to navigate the frustration of a project that isn’t working. The ability to learn from peers. I want him to be in environments that teach him how to be a human among humans, rather than a “calculator” among machines. We have to be open to the idea that the “elite degree” might be the most expensive, least useful thing we can give our kids. We can’t shut down these points of view just because they make our own path feel invalidated. We have to hear them.
The Seniority Trap: Managing by Proxy
In many ways, my career was built on being an “abstract leader.” I was the one who set the intent, and the teams executed. But the more I looked at how Agentic AI is evolving, the more I realized that if you don’t understand the “how,” your “what” is going to be dangerously wrong.
There is a quiet fear among senior folks right now. It’s the vibe that all the expertise we’ve accumulated over 20 years is being re-indexed. When you are a “hands-off” manager, that fear turns into paralysis. You start making “safe” decisions because you don’t actually know how the new tools work.
I decided that the only way out of the fear was through the craft.
I’ve spent the last few months unlearning the habit of “delegating understanding.” I started getting my hands dirty again. I began using Cursor to write code—not to become a software engineer, but to understand the logic of the partner I’m now building with. I started running evals on agents, digging into why they fail and where they excel.
What I found was that “managing” in this era isn’t about giving orders; it’s about “curating” intent. If you’re still managing via high-level status updates, you’re missing the nuance of the new reality. You’re trying to navigate a forest using a map of a different country.
The Beautiful Truth: Humans Still Need Humans
The most “spicy” take in tech right now is that AI is going to replace the human element entirely. That agents will run the world and we will just be observers.
After getting my hands back into the work, I can tell you: that future is a myth.
The more we automate the “heavy lifting” of logic, the more we realize how much we still need human judgment. I’ve discovered that while AI can generate a thousand iterations of an idea, it cannot feel the “soul” of a product. It can’t tell you if a feature will actually solve the deep, emotional frustration of a user at 2:00 AM.
Humanity is becoming the ultimate premium. The “oversold” promise of total automation misses the point. We don’t need fewer leaders; we need different leaders. We need people who can bridge the gap between “what the machine says” and “what the human needs.”
My years at Amazon taught me “Customer Obsession,” and my time at McKinsey taught me “First Principles.” Those haven’t been devalued—they’ve been amplified. But you can only apply them if you’re close enough to the work to see where the machine is missing the mark.
Action is the Antidote
The ambiguity of this moment is real. It’s personal. It touches everything from our career security to how we raise our kids.
But hope isn’t something you wait for; it’s something you build. It comes from the small win of getting an agent to execute a complex workflow because you understood the architecture well enough to guide it. It comes from the realization that your 15 years of “judgment” is more valuable than ever, provided you’re willing to apply it at a granular level.
If you’re a senior leader feeling like a dinosaur, stop reading the doom-scrolling headlines and start breaking things.
Block an hour a week to be “junior” again.
Download the tools your teams are using.
Ask the “embarrassing” questions.
Stop being “hands-off.”
The world isn’t being taken over by agents; it’s being re-tooled by people who aren’t afraid to learn how to use them. For the sake of our own relevance, and for the world we’re building for our 3.5-year-olds, it’s time to get back to the craft.
It’s a bit of a mess right now, but honestly, that’s where the fun is. That’s where the leadership actually happens.