AI excels at information and efficiency, but professional development is emotional work that requires human connection, trust, and presence. Here’s why the work that actually transforms teams can’t be automated and what leaders risk by trying.
Written by Lyndon Friesen, who leads our Professional Development arm of Outback Team Building, called Ignitor. Over the past 10 years, Lyndon and his skilled team of Facilitators have led over 800 different learning and development events for over 500 different organizations across North America.
AI is everywhere right now. You can’t go through a day without hearing about what it can do, what it will do, and how it’s changing everything.
And in many cases, that’s true.
This technology has a massive place in our world. I think it’s real, it’s happening, and it’s here to stay.
But here’s what I know from experience:
When it comes to professional development and team building, AI couldn’t be further from what actually works.
You can’t ask robots to do profoundly human work.
Here’s what I mean.
Table of Contents
- Testing the Tech: Why My AI-Generated Coaching Session Wouldn’t Pass the Real-World Test
- What AI Can’t Replicate: The Emotional Work of Professional Development
- The Human Elements That Drive Real Development
- The Risks of Over-Relying on AI in Professional Development
- The Gap Between Knowing and Doing That AI Can’t Close
- As AI Grows in 2026, So Will the Need for What It Can’t Do
- Why We’ve Chosen Relationships Over Scale
Testing the Tech: Why My AI-Generated Coaching Session Wouldn’t Pass the Real-World Test
Recently, I decided to test the tech for myself. With all the talk about what AI can do, I wanted to see if it could actually handle what we do.
So, I asked it to create a coaching session for one of our clients.
The result?
It was cookie-cutter, vanilla, and dressed down. It added no real value.
The truth is that not one of our customers would have paid for what AI produced. It was generic to the point of being useless.
It sounded professional on the surface, but had no connection to the actual challenges that the client was facing.
More importantly, it lacked an understanding of their team dynamics, industry pressures, and the specific pain points they’d shared with us.
It just couldn’t make sense of it all.
And I can already hear the AI proponents in my life saying, “You have to train it, you’ve got to do this, you’ve got to do that.”
Maybe.
Or I could listen to our customers, hear their pain and feel its nuance, ask questions to get to the heart of it, and then put on a bespoke session tailored to what they actually need.
What AI Can’t Replicate: The Emotional Work of Professional Development
Effective professional development is fundamentally about relationships, teams, and being fully present with people.
It’s about listening to them, understanding their challenges, and creating environments where they can work together at a high level.
That’s what we do at Outback, and AI is the opposite of all of it.
Don’t get me wrong.
AI is phenomenal for left-brain, step-by-step, academic work like task management, information synthesis, and process documentation.
It’s ridiculously good at speed, efficiency, and scale.
But professional development isn’t academic work. Rather, it’s emotional work. It’s about trust, vulnerability, change, and growth, and AI is terrible at holding emotion.
The need for relationships, community, presence, and high-level performance with a group of people who are highly communicative and understand each other is as high as it’s ever been.
It may even be higher than it’s ever been, given how fast we’re running.
Technology has allowed us to go way, way faster, but faster doesn’t always mean more effective.
We’ve done 900 events over the past decade, and what our customers consistently tell us is that it’s how the content was delivered in a practical, relational way that made the difference:
- People accepted the tools we gave them instead of rejecting them
- They embraced their teammates, looked them in the eye, interpreted body language, and began to understand each other in new ways that let them work more effectively
That’s not AI driving that. When it happens, teams work more effectively, skills get developed, and growth occurs.
The Human Elements That Drive Real Development
When I facilitate a professional development session, the first 15 minutes have one objective: building trust.
I need people to trust me, because I’m about to take them through content that’s practical, exercise-driven, and not generic.
It’s content that often asks them to look at themselves honestly, examine how they show up, and consider changing behaviors they’ve relied on for years.
That’s deeply personal work. It requires vulnerability, and you can’t get vulnerability without trust first.
I’m also aware of the dynamics in the room way before I got there. I know who’s struggling with what, where the tension points are, and what the team’s been through recently.
That awareness shapes everything about how the session unfolds, and that’s not something AI can build.
When an organization or leader calls us, we don’t just deliver a pre-packaged session. We listen. Then, we help them uncover what their issues actually are, to a degree they didn’t realize before we got on the call.
I just finished a discovery call where the person at the end said, “I never knew that somebody would help me understand our issues as much as you did before you’ve even worked with us.”
That’s what we do, why we exist, and how we make a difference.
From the moment we engage with an organization or leader, we believe that whatever reason they’re calling is unique to them. There’s not a single other business in North America that shares the exact same nuanced objectives that they have.
We help them discover those objectives, uncover them, and then create a proposal and an agenda tailored specifically to address what we’ve talked about.
Then we deliver it in a way that’s very relational, where they trust us.
This is a highly human endeavor.
The Risks of Over-Relying on AI in Professional Development
Here’s what concerns me about the rush to AI-ify everything:
We’re unconsciously telling young people entering the workforce that we don’t actually want them to think creatively, abstractly, or to problem-solve off-the-wall.
Rather, we’re signaling that we want them to think well inside the tunnel.
It’s become so much about:
- How many emails?
- How many phone calls?
- How many meetings?
And we call that productivity.
Organizations are beginning to realize the difference between how busy we were and how effective or productive we actually were.
I’m starting to see leaders realize they worked hard and stayed busy, but somehow missed their goals. And despite all that effort, their teams are exhausted.
AI can help us do more stuff, but it doesn’t necessarily help us do more of the right stuff.
The Gap Between Knowing and Doing That AI Can’t Close
Here’s what organizations fear most: investing in professional development only to have nothing change afterward.
There are tremendous amounts of information available online, and AI makes it all quickly and easily accessible, but accessing information and changing behavior are completely different things.
The real work isn’t delivering content. It’s helping people see themselves clearly, accept what they see, and decide what they’re going to do differently.
That’s awareness, acceptance, and application.
AI can deliver the information, but it can’t facilitate the transformation.
As AI Grows in 2026, So Will the Need for What It Can’t Do
As we move further into 2026, AI will become even more prominent, and its applications will become even more diverse.
Leaders will be tempted to use it for everything, and in many cases, they should.
But when it comes to team dynamics, professional development, and the kind of work that builds trust, strengthens relationships, and helps people grow, leaders need to recognize AI’s limitations.
The frenetic pace we run at, enabled by technology, squeezes self-awareness out of teams. To be self-aware, you’ve got to be reflective, thoughtful, and present.
Those three things are not valued in most careers right now. Instead, what’s valued is speed, throughput, pace.
None of that is conducive to self-awareness.
And yet self-awareness is exactly what people need to perform at a high level, to collaborate effectively, and to navigate the complexity of modern work.
Why We’ve Chosen Relationships Over Scale
At Outback, we exist primarily to have people come together and appreciate, value, learn, collaborate, ideate, problem-solve, and perform at a high level together.
And none of that can happen through AI-generated content delivered at scale.
I’m not saying AI doesn’t have a role, because it does.
I’m just saying that when it comes to the work that actually matters in professional development—the trust-building, the nuance-detecting, the issue-uncovering, the relationship-driven work that helps teams become more effective—AI can’t replicate that.
And if organizations chase efficiency at the expense of effectiveness, they’ll find themselves with faster processes and weaker teams.
Learn how to develop your team effectively.
Get in touch with our Employee Engagement Consultants today to learn how customized professional development can strengthen your team’s performance, relationships, and results.
