Post by WILLIAM MCCANN

CORA Daily Brief Late Edition — LinkedIn Post (Thursday, June 18, 2026) A CEO told me his new AI people-analytics platform "does what HR used to do." He'd cut the team by a third. Real-time sentiment, predictive turnover scores, engagement dashboards. Beautiful system. Six months later, two of his best senior managers quit in the same quarter. No flags. No warning scores. The dashboard said they were fine. One of them carried $4M in client relationships. Replacing the two of them ran close to $600K. The system wasn't wrong about what it measured. It just couldn't measure what mattered. Here's the part operators keep missing: AI doesn't delete the manager's job. It automates the legible half — scheduling, reporting, coordination, performance tracking — and leaves behind the half almost nobody knows how to measure. The relational work. The 40-minute unplanned conversation with someone who's quietly checked out. Sociologist Allison Pugh calls it "connective labor": the work of actually seeing another person. It produces no deliverable. So we engineer it out. We stack more reporting on the hours automation freed up, push spans of control to 18 reports, and call twelve minutes a week per person "lean." Then we act surprised when our best people leave for somewhere they feel known. The efficiency you reinvest in more reporting was never efficiency. And "fine" is the most dangerous word in your org — it means nothing's on fire, and nothing's being tended to. AI will not save your culture. The people leader who still has time to know her people will. Riffing on Moe Carrick's "The work AI can't do" (Fast Company). Today's full CORA Daily Brief is live: https://lnkd.in/gm3jDF69