If you’ve ever had a gut feeling that your last performance review sounded a little too polished, you might be onto something. New research suggests a growing number of Australian managers are turning to AI not just for emails and presentations, but for the moments that actually define good leadership: difficult conversations.
The survey, commissioned by Dynamic Leadership Programs Australia (DLPA) and conducted among 1,008 Australian business leaders and workers, found that 53% of managers who use AI have leaned on it for at least one sensitive management task, whether that’s preparing for a performance review, managing conflict, or responding to an employee complaint.
For women navigating leadership roles or climbing toward them, the findings raise a timely question: as AI takes on more of the “hard stuff”, what happens to the human skills that leadership actually runs on?
AI Is Already in the Room for Your Toughest Moments
The numbers get specific. Among AI-using managers surveyed, 22% had used AI for performance reviews, 19% for responding to complaints, 19% for difficult conversations, and 18% for delivering difficult feedback. Another 15% said they’d used AI to help manage conflict, while 12% admitted to using it specifically to avoid a difficult conversation altogether.
Karlie Cremin, CEO of DLPA and Crestcom ANZ, says this shift raises a genuine leadership question: where should AI assistance end, and where does human accountability begin?
“Difficult conversations are not an inconvenience of leadership – they define leadership,” Cremin says. “AI can be a highly valuable tool to help managers prepare, structure their thinking, and check their tone. However, we risk weakening the very human skills effective leadership requires if technology is increasingly used to outsource uncomfortable interactions.”
Women Are Watching This Shift Closely … and Feeling It Differently
The report’s wider insights (drawn from DLPA’s companion Insights Report) suggest women are experiencing the AI shift at work in a notably different way to their male counterparts. Half of the Australian workforce believe AI has improved their ability to think critically, but women are the outlier: female workers were more likely than the total workforce to feel their critical thinking has actually weakened since relying on AI tools.
Women are also more cautious about what AI means for their future. Four in ten working women hold significant concerns that AI will replace parts of their day-to-day role, and 17% believe roles in their field will disappear entirely within five years. Female workers were also more likely than average to feel uneasy about colleagues seeing their AI chat history, pointing to a quieter discomfort around how visibly AI is being leaned on at work.
It’s a useful data point for anyone making the case for AI literacy training in their workplace: employees aren’t experiencing this shift uniformly, and some feel more anxious than others.
Here’s where it gets interesting for anyone managing a team, or hoping to one day. While a quarter of senior managers are using AI for performance reviews, only 9% of the workforce say they’d be entirely comfortable knowing their manager did so. And over a third of employees say they trust AI-generated workplace communications less than ones written by a human, even when they can’t always tell the difference: 35% of workers believe their workplace communications are rarely or never AI-assisted, when the reality is likely much higher.
That’s a meaningful trust gap for leaders to navigate, particularly women in management who are often already working harder to build credibility with their teams.
The Risk Of Training That Hasn’t Caught Up
Perhaps the most telling finding isn’t about AI at all. It’s about how underprepared workplaces are for it. 75% of the Australian workforce say they’ve received no formal AI training, and 54% feel their organisation hasn’t provided enough guidance on how to use it. Meanwhile, 69% say leadership hasn’t clearly communicated how AI may affect their jobs and roles going forward.
Cremin argues this isn’t just a tech adoption issue, it’s a leadership one. “Organisations need to train managers to use AI as a tool for preparation only, ensuring they remain personally accountable for decisions that affect their teams,” she says. “The ultimate goal of using AI in the workplace must be to make leaders better prepared for human conversations, ensuring human empathy, judgement, and accountability remain firmly in the driver’s seat.”
The Future Is (Still) Human
Despite the rapid uptake, the appetite for AI-led management simply isn’t there. 84% of the Australian workforce say they’d rather be managed by a person than AI, and 35% say they’d feel uncomfortable knowing AI had written their performance review.
For women building their careers in tech and leadership right now, the takeaway is a reassuring one: the soft skills, judgement, emotional intelligence, and the willingness to have the hard conversation yourself, aren’t going out of style. If anything, as AI absorbs more of the administrative load, those human capabilities may become the clearest differentiator in who gets to lead.
As Cremin puts it: “AI can help prepare a manager for a difficult conversation, but it cannot assume the responsibility for actually leading it.”
