You never learned to delegate. AI just made it obvious.

You finish the day with thirty things still on your list. You ask your AI assistant to prepare a summary of the week’s meetings to send to the team. You give it five minutes, trust the output, and hit send. The next day, three replies. None positive. What went wrong? Not the AI. The AI did exactly what you asked. The problem is what you asked, how you asked it, and what you expected without saying so. The human buffer When you delegate to a person, they fill in the gaps. They read the context, ask questions, assume what you probably meant. They patch your incomplete instructions with their experience and goodwill. Decades of working with people have trained you to rely on this buffer. You learned to delegate just well enough that a capable human could save you from yourself. So you never had to confront the actual quality of your instructions. The person you delegated to quietly filled in what was missing, and the work got done. You assumed you were a decent delegator. You probably…