Leah Warwick: Hi, everyone. I’m Leah Warwick, and you’re listening to The Admin Edge. This episode was recorded at the Administrative Professionals Conference 2025, in Seattle, with me talking to one of our keynote speakers at this event, Erica Keswin. We tackle a still very timely topic, how to be a great human leader in the age of AI. I hope you enjoy this conversation between me and Erica on the show floor at APC.

Hi, I’m Leah Warwick, Senior Content Manager at the American Society of Administrative Professionals, and my guest today is Erica Keswin, a three-time Wall Street Journal bestselling author, workplace strategist, and keynote speaker at this event, the Administrative Professionals Conference. Welcome to the podcast, Erica.

00:00:56

Erica Keswin: Thank you so much for having me.

Leah Warwick: It’s such a pleasure to have you here, and I’m so excited for your keynote soon. I have so many questions for you, so we’ll just get right into it. So, for the past two decades, your work has helped to define what it means to be a human leader, with the books you’ve authored including Bring Your Human to Work; Rituals Roadmap; and The Retention Revolution. What are you seeing now, with how rapidly AI is changing workplaces? What are we gaining? What are we losing?

Erica Keswin: Start off with just a small question.

Leah Warwick: You know, small stakes.

Erica Keswin: So, interestingly, I wrote Bring Your Human to Work in 2018, well before COVID, well before everything we know about work and how it’s changed today. Just as a funny sidenote, when I wrote Bring Your Human to Work, people thought I was talking about my dog, Cruiser, who’s a very human Labradoodle. But, no, I was actually talking about bringing your whole self to work.

00:01:52

What’s been interesting, in answer to your question, is that now, all these years later, I almost feel like we’ve gone full circle back to bringing your human to work in the age of AI. What does it actually mean to be human? If I were to boil it down to two things, one is being human at work is about honoring relationships. That’s honoring relationships, especially in the world of administrative professionals, with your boss, with your colleagues, with your clients, with your customers, with your direct reports (if you have them), and, of course, with yourself.

The second piece of that is we need to continue to find what I call the sweet spot between tech and connect. We need to leverage it for all of its greatness. I mean, look at us. We’ve got all of this fancy technology right now. But then we need to put it in its place and connect on a deeper level, and so that’s really this ongoing struggle.

00:02:47

Where there’s a will, there’s a way, and we need to be intentional to do it well.

Leah Warwick: I like that, come with intention, because often we are not very intentional in our work. We go on autopilot. We’re not always thinking about the other human across the table from us, or perhaps on the other side of the screen, right? I love your work in that way, and I can’t wait to talk to you more about it.

Now, at our event, the Administrative Professionals Conference, not all of them have direct reports, but they all work with people very heavily. They often lead company culture. They lead projects. They lead operations. And so AI is now widely used as a tool to increase operational efficiency, so when it comes to those human qualities that you still have to balance, what do you think is most needed moving into the future? What are the human qualities that are most important to retain

00:03:43

Erica Keswin: Well, first I would say that, again, the technology is great, but here’s where we get into trouble: the default use of technology degrades connection. It’s that default. So, what we need to bring as humans goes back. I’d say, number one, we’ve got to be intentional or we’re all going to fall into that trap of defaulting.

The other piece is that—I don’t really cook very much, although now my kids are in college and out of the house, so I don’t really have to, but I think about: What is a recipe of a human leader? My recipe is one part vulnerability, one part empathy, and one part experimentation. And so what I mean by that is when we are human at work, the best leaders have a willingness to show that they may not have all the answers. We saw a lot of that during the pandemic, and even though it was such a crazy and stressful time, and I often say I would never want to go back to March of 2020, I also don’t want to forget everything that we felt and saw, because there were some amazing moments in terms of leaders really bringing some of that vulnerability. The flipside is that the people that worked for them and with them felt more connected than ever. So, I would say vulnerability.

00:04:58

The second piece is empathy, understanding that not all of us are going to be so comfortable with these new tools, or understanding that last week we were in the office there days and now we’re upping it to four days. We may have to figure out what to do with our dogs or our kids.

And the last part is great human leaders approach these things through the lens of experimentation. I feel like that almost sort of takes the stress down. We’re walking around like this, but if I can say, “You know what? We’re going to test this out, get feedback, and you know what? We may keep it, or we may reverse course.” So those are some of the things that I feel like the most human leaders are bringing to the table.

Leah Warwick: Oh, I like that: empathy, experimentation, and vulnerability. That is key because, as a recovering perfectionist myself, for a long time I thought, well, I have to have the right answer to everything that I’m being asked. And if I don’t, they’re going to think less of me. And the truth is, people crave human connection, like you’re saying, so understanding where the other person is coming from, the empathy. Being vulnerable, allowing them into your world that way, and then just saying, “Let just try this. Let’s experiment,” because that’s all what we’re really doing in life, right? It’s all a big experiment.

00:06:12

We can all relate to each other in that way. We’re all humans. We all struggle. We all don’t have the right answer every time, even though we might pretend that we do, right? So, it’s just better to be real and have those real connections at work, which can be very difficult.

And something that came to mind—I was reading The Harvard Business Review, and they had an article that came out this year (2025) and they shared research on generative AI. They revealed that the number one use of gen AI currently is for therapy and companionship. So, people are using ChatGPT as their personal therapist, essentially. That got me thinking about the workplace. What do you think that says, as it relates to your work and the importance of bringing that humanity into the workplace as a leader?

00:06:58

For me, what I read into is people feel like they cannot express their true feelings or their struggles. They have to be. They have to be perfect. They have to project a certain image of themselves, and then it doesn’t feel good. So what do you think about that?

Erica Keswin: I love the way you asked that, because it’s looking at the data. Those two questions really go well together because if we are better human leaders, maybe we won’t have this issue where the people in our organizations are scared to open up to a manager or to a coach that is assigned by the company.

On the one hand, when I think about AI used for coaching, the positive is that it can begin to democratize and more people can get access. So, I think that’s a positive.

00:07:50

But the other side is I just think we need to proceed with caution because the technology, in many ways, is not really there yet, and so it does worry me a little bit that we need to take—you’re going to take what a human says with a grain of salt, and I just hope, at least for the foreseeable future, that people will take what their AI therapist or coach is also saying with a grain of salt.

I read a study the other day, which I’ll find and I’ll send it to you—I think it would also be really interesting, and kind of depressing—[that] 40% of Gen Z employees say that they would rather have an AI manager, as in a chatbot, than a human manager. But I think it goes back to the question that you asked. If people feel like they can’t be themselves and they can’t show any vulnerability, and there’s a culture that’s not supporting that, I guess I’d want a chatbot as a manager, too.

00:08:50

So the positive, especially for a group of administrative professionals who, as you said, are helping to drive the culture, who are so integral to so many different people and projects and programs throughout the organization, if they can bring some of this to the organization, I think it’ll make a big difference.

Leah Warwick: I couldn’t agree more. As sad as I am to hear that, it also tracks for me, because if people feel like they can’t be themselves, then they are like, “Well, then I might as well have an AI being my manager if I can’t really be who I am, and I feel like I can be who I am with this AI chatbot,” it makes total sense. But, yes, there’s a great opportunity in there for managers to really let their walls down, [be] people leaders and say, “This is what people need.”

Erica Keswin: Sometimes people will say to me, “Well, how much of your human—how much of your whole self are you really bringing to work?” So, I would just want to mention that, again, this is still work. This is a professional environment, so I am not sitting here, suggesting you’re going to literally throw every ounce of your being into the workplace, into the project.

00:10:00

That could mean it’s on a continuum. It’s different for different people, but I think we need to remember that we’re still talking about a professional environment.

Leah Warwick: Yes, thank you for saying that, because I think there is a middle ground between completely pretending to be a different person and locking away your true self, and being exactly at work as you would be with your partner at home or your best friend. You do switch into different modes and that’s okay. When I think about being real at work, there is still an element of communication and what kind of communication is right for the right context that I’m in. Actually, that’s a pretty good use of AI, in my opinion, is to workshop some of those things. People do it all the time with emails, with “How do I professionally say…” or “How do I say this with tact? How do I say this more politely?” That could be a good use of AI, too.

00:10:56

Erica Keswin: 100%. I love that, love it.

Leah Warwick: We have a listener question, submitted by one of our community members, and they wrote in: If AI continues to evolve at the current pace, where do you see the biggest opportunities for admins to step up as strategic partners in the business?

Erica Keswin: So, if the technology continues to get better, and if the admin community steps up and learns all of the different sort of tactical—even just that example you just gave—ways to help support bringing groups together, sending emails, creating rituals, all these different things, it will then free up time to be more strategic, to be more human. One of the things I love about getting to know this population is that if they had more time—and I know so many of them feel like they are drowning in task after task after task—if we can get some of the technology to do that, I think their role—they really could be the ultimate dot-connector, because they see so much across the organization to say, “I was on this project with this group and this project, and here’s really what’s going on.”

00:12:11

And you can really elevate that to a much more strategic and impactful level. We know that that’s part of what draws people to this type of a role is that they want to help people. They want to have impact. So, I’m feeling really positive about it. The key is to learn it and play around with it, experiment with it, and then begin to see the additional levels of value that you’re going to be able to add. And share stories, because I think what’s amazing about this community is—I would love to see at next year’s conference, or if you do other things (which I’m sure you do) during the year, they need to learn from each other and share these stories with the kinds of value that they are finding they can add so that other people in this community can learn from them.

00:13:02

Leah Warwick: Oh, yes. You’re so right. I think it takes a special kind of person to be in a support role and to partner with other people and just be there for other people, which the administrative professional community is so good at. Their human skills are already their superpowers. What happens is, with all of this tactical work like you’re describing, “Oh, I have to spend so much time in my calendar, in my inbox, in my project management tools.” AI can speed up all of that. The good news is that things that took away from those really important human skills that are already so crucial for you in your role, now you’re going to have more time to do that, we hope. That’s the goal. Now you’re going to have more time to do that, we hope. I mean, that’s the goal.

Erica Keswin: Being human, you’re supporting a senior leader, and your ability as the administrative professional to read the room, figure out when the right time [is] to tell your boss something or not, AI is not going to do that.

00:13:57

I really do think that—and I know not just in this community, but in many others, there is so much anxiety right now about learning these tools. I sat in on one of the brain sessions yesterday, and people were starting to learn the tools and get comfortable, and then really can free up some time to, to your point, do what we know got you into this profession to begin with, and what really are some of their superpowers.

Leah Warwick: Yes. Could not agree more. It’s been such a pleasure to talk to you about all of this. Thank you so much for joining us on the podcast.

Erica Keswin: You’re welcome.

Leah Warwick: Where can our listeners find you online?

Erica Keswin: You can find me at my website, which is just my name, ericakeswin.com. You get links to the books and talks and podcasts, and we’ll have to add this podcast to my website as well. So, really excited to be here, and it’s a special, special group.

00:14:50

Leah Warwick: Thank you so much, and I hope you have a great time today.

Erica Keswin: Thank you.

[music playing]

Leah Warwick: Thank you for listening to The Admin Edge, produced by the American Society of Administrative Professionals, original music and audio editing by Warwick Productions, with audio and video production by 5Tool Productions. If you liked this podcast, please leave us a nice review, five stars, and subscribe. If you’d like to submit a listener question, you may do so on our website at ASAPorg.com/podcast.