AI can’t replace trust

Podcast · Unapologetic Leadership

Guest Mike Reardon · With Host Cory Dunham · 6 min read

Cory Dunham told me something on his podcast that should worry every owner. He has watched leaders start using AI tools and, almost overnight, act like relationships matter less.

Like the software will do the follow-up. The automation will do the trust building. The prompts will do the thinking.

I understand the temptation. AI is the first tool in decades that genuinely gives a small team big-company speed. But speed is all it gives you. And here is the one idea I want you to take from our conversation:

Faster is not the same as trusted

Ask yourself a blunt question. When a big deal closed last year, what actually closed it? The proposal template? Or the moment a human on your team read the room, heard what the client didn’t say, and adjusted?

In the episode I call that the 20%. AI handles the routine 80% of revenue work well — the drafting, the scheduling, the data entry nobody misses. But the 20% it can’t touch is the part where deals live or die: judgment, situational awareness, and the trust built across a dozen small kept promises.

Automate the 80% and you free your people for the 20%. Try to automate the 20% and you get faster at losing deals. There is a reason MIT Project NANDA’s GenAI Divide study (July 2025) found 95% of enterprise AI pilots returned nothing measurable. The tool was pointed at work that was never mapped — and at trust that was never built. I lay out the full argument in AI Is Enabled by Process: the field comes first, then the technology.

Your employees are watching the same movie

Here is the part most AI conversations skip. Your buyers are not the only people deciding whether to believe you. Your team is too.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 (released April 2026) reports 80% of employees worldwide are not engaged. Not lazy — not engaged. And every AI headline telling your best people they might be redundant pushes that number the wrong way inside your walls.

So when a leader adopts AI and quietly deprioritizes relationships, employees notice first. The rules of the game just changed mid-play, again. And people do not give their best effort to a game whose rules move — that’s the argument I make in Your Best People Keep Score Every Weekend. Just Not for You. Trust is the entry fee for performance, and it is paid in rule stability, not in software licenses.

Cory works the forest. I work the trees.

What made this conversation click is that Cory and I attack the same problem from two altitudes. Cory works at what I’d call the Forest View — conviction, integrity, the kind of leadership people choose to follow. I install at the Tree Level: the revenue operating system underneath it. Strategy that gives people the why. Operations mapped so the work is easy to run. Performance with clear rules and a scoreboard the player owns.

Both altitudes agree on the diagnosis: when revenue stalls, it is almost never a sales-effort problem. It is a system problem wearing a people costume. Big Corporate would love you to believe your people are the leak. Usually the leak is the system nobody ever wrote down — and the fastest way to prove which one you have is a diagnosis you can hold in your hand. That’s what a Revenue Blueprint is for, and it’s built on the same principle as this whole episode: trust is earned structurally, not claimed verbally.

Listen to the episode

One question to sit with, from both of us: if AI took over every routine task in your business tomorrow, would your customers and your employees trust you more — or would they finally have time to notice they don’t?

Sources cited: Gallup, State of the Global Workplace 2026 (released April 2026); MIT Project NANDA, The GenAI Divide (July 2025).