November 11, 2026 · View in browser

The Insightful Leader

BY KELLOGG INSIGHT

Leadership advice from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University

Good morning,

Leading through the AI revolution requires an astute sense of judgement. And few decisions are more important than choosing when to deploy AI and when to unleash your human talent on a task.

This week, Kellogg’s Richard Jolly offers a handy rubric for making that call. Then we hear from Kellogg’s Gina Fong how marketers can get the most out of using “synth personas” to gain customer insights.

Is this a HUMAN job?

While you may be tempted to experiment with AI in a lot of work contexts, the cost of doing so may not always be worth the discovery. In a new article, Jolly recommends that before you delegate an office project, you first ask, “Is this one of the things whose value is that a human does it?”

Because humans are better at establishing and maintaining authentic human relationships, Jolly identifies five areas of relationship-based work where people outperform machines. He offers a battery of questions that help classify a job as better for humans or AI, which he describes under the acronym HUMAN.

- Does this situation require a Human touch?

- Is it the kind of Unscripted situation where human judgement and improvisation are important?

- Is there a Moral responsibility for a human to own this?

- Is it a highly Adaptive situation where success requires adjusting your priors?

- Is it a task where a compelling Narrative will make a difference to its success or failure?

This framework makes the decision about delegation easier for leaders and their teams. It also helps to ensure that the more rewarding and satisfying work stays in human hands.

“Employees want to feel like they’re making a difference, doing something that’s meaningful, doing the cooler stuff,” Jolly says. “I think that’s the challenge for all of us: to focus our time and energy on the things where we’re really adding value.”

What synth personas can tell you about customers

The decisions about when and how to engage with AI extend to how to learn about and interact with customers. The time-consuming and expensive tasks of gathering data, conducting focus groups, and testing campaigns may seem ripe for AI interventions. Spin up a digital-composite synth persona that reflects your customers, and the tedious work of consumer research gets a lot easier.

While these virtual customers can be useful tools, according to Fong, the information they provide shouldn’t be confused for actual consumer insights.

“They’re a handy research tool when you’re preparing and exploring,” Fong says, “but they are much less effective at capturing the nuance, emotion, empathy, and unpredictability that real people offer.”

Rather than replace consumer research, synth personas can be deployed to strengthen the early stages of the process, when preparing for ethnographic interviews in the field—especially in unfamiliar categories for the researchers.

But real people tell you things synth personas simply can’t—especially when discussing motivations, irrational quirks, and contradictions about consumer choices.

“When you’re using synth personas, you don’t get any of the messiness that being human entails,” Fong says. “Everything is rounded; nothing is sharp; nothing is contrasted.”