The real challenge for leaders is to free up time by automating invisible micro-tasks.
Mark Zuckerberg recently announced the development of an AI clone capable of attending meetings and interacting with his teams for him. Technically fascinating, this project is also philosophically revealing. For the founder of Meta, human relations seem to be a cost to be eliminated.
This challenge does not only concern entrepreneurs. It affects any individual with management responsibilities. Their real value lies in their judgment, their vision and their relationships, and yet their time is overwhelmingly consumed by execution, coordination and administration. The most visible of these “time consumers” are often meetings and human interactions. It is therefore understandable that they want to move away from these tasks to focus on what creates real value.
However, this assumption masks reality. Often it’s the micro-tasks that consume their time, but they are more invisible and accumulate incrementally. These micro-tasks, which only take a few seconds, add up and, over the course of a week or a month, end up swallowing up hours or even days. What about human interactions? These are often the moments when the organization creates disruptive value: brainstorming, customer relations, and much more. Of course, you have to manage meetings, agendas and avoid getting involved in discussions that do not provide proportional value. But completely removing them from your day is not the right solution.
Imagine this scenario: “It’s 7:30 a.m. Before I even drink my coffee, I have 23 emails to sort, a meeting to confirm, a customer follow-up pending for three days and a proposal to finalize by noon. My day has already started without me. »
Does this remind you of some of your mornings? Or maybe even all of them? You are not alone! According to an Emailing-biz study in June 2024, around 30% of executives’ working time is dedicated to email management. Reading and responding to emails can take up to two hours a day, reducing the time available for other crucial tasks.
For the entrepreneur, the company ends up taking everything, even though he built it to be free. For the employee manager, he has climbed the ranks to decide and inspire, and finds himself stuck in processes that could have been automated. In either case, overload is not a personal failure, but a structural flaw in the way organizations are designed.
The solution I envision is to get involved in an ongoing pursuit of creating a Digital Twin Organization. It is an intelligent operational layer that manages everything that does not require the human presence of the manager. The digital twin supports emails, reminders, meeting coordination, document writing, task tracking, calendar management, summaries and briefings. The leader maintains supervision, strategic decisions, vision, relationships, creative thinking and inspiration.
For example, today, my AI executive assistant manages my emails, coordinates my calendar, writes proposals, follows up on follow-ups and prepares my briefings, in my voice, in my register, with my level of requirements. He doesn’t represent me. He frees me so that I can be fully, where it counts.
And the fundamental distinction with Zuckerberg? His clone interacts with people in his place. The digital twin manages everything except human interactions, so that the manager can concentrate fully on them.
This is a first step, not a completed system. The Digital Twin Organization is a progressive construction, not a product that we install.
What this could make concretely possible for me:
- Be truly present in each conversation, without having your mind occupied by what lies ahead.
- Think in the long term, without being constantly reminded of operational urgency.
- Build deep professional and human relationships, rather than managing them on the surface.
- Create, innovate, decide and do what no AI can do instead of a human who leads.
- Live more, not just perform more.
And you too, want to free yourself from operational matters and focus on growth and a better-balanced life? Here are the first steps I recommend:
- Document all steps of all tasks that involve you, regardless of the time involved.
- Define precisely what an ideal digital twin would and would not do. Build an operational chain and don’t forget to incorporate human governance on all sensitive decisions.
- Be transparent with your teams and partners about what is delegated to AI.
- Accept an iterative progression: perfection is not the starting point.
Zuckerberg’s announcement at least has the merit of forcing the question. The real question is not “How can AI represent me?” “, but “How can AI free me from tasks that do not deserve my time, and allow me to become more present for humans and human issues? »
And you, what would you do with two more hours a day, truly free, truly yours?
