Hi Reader,

What do you think the top AI use is in 2026?

Harvard Business Review studied 12,637 real cases of people using AI. And the #1 is Therapy and companionship — same as 2025.

The most common way people use AI is for their personal life. To talk something through.

Across all 12,637 cases, we see three main scenarios. People use AI to think, to feel, and to work.

To feel — they talk through stress, ask for relationship advice, or work out what a message from their boss really meant.
To think — they ask it to poke holes in an argument before a big meeting, or to weigh two strategies side by side.
To work — they draft the email, summarize the two-hour meeting, fix the broken code.

And the first one is huge. Most of it is really about communication — how to say a hard thing to another person. That’s one of the biggest reasons people turn to AI. And it’s most true for managers.

New research from Predictive Index found that 72% of managers use AI tools to prepare for people conversations. How to handle a difficult talk. How to give feedback. How to tell someone they didn’t get the promotion. How to let someone go.

As a coach, this is exactly what I help leaders learn — how to have these hard conversations. But not everyone has that kind of support. Most managers are left to work it out on their own. So they turn to AI to rehearse it. And they use public AI, because their organization gives them nothing better. Almost no one supports the relational side of the job, so managers reach for what’s in front of them and rehearse the hard talk with the only advisor they have.

Here’s the problem. In the same study, 44% of managers admitted they’d typed real employee names and performance details into public AI. And only 45% of organizations have any policy about it.

You can understand why. I’d love to think things through before I walk in. But that impulse carries private information about real people into systems that were never built to hold it. HBR has a name for this: shadow usage. Its data shows how common it’s become.

So it’s good that managers finally have something to help them prepare. What’s missing is the other half — a safe, reliable way to do it.

Two ways to get there

The first is the GC Index, which I wrote about last Thursday. Inside the system, you have your own profile and your team members' profiles. Before a conversation, you prepare for a specific person (how they contribute, what gives them energy, where friction is likely) using their real profile. It stays in the closed system.

Nothing about a real employee leaves for an open tool. It's a clean way to walk into a performance review, a feedback session, or a development conversation.

Go check it out

The second is something I use myself: AI as a private thinking partner for my own decisions. Mine holds my reports from the assessments I've taken — GC Index, Big Five, StrengthsFinder, and a few others — so its advice is built around how I think and decide, not generic. I run it in incognito mode, so nothing is saved. If you want your own, here's the link — go download instructions on how to build it; it's free and super easy

Get your AI Advisor

Communication will always ask the most of us as leaders, and it's the part you can prepare for. The safest, most reliable ways to get better at it don't live in a public chatbox. They live in leadership coaching. In learning alongside a group of peers. And in a closed AI that already knows you and your team, and keeps what it knows inside instead of sending it anywhere else.

Prepare for the hard conversations. Just do it without hurting someone else's privacy.

See you next Thursday.

Daria

P.S. I'd love to know what your most common use for AI is right now. Hit reply and tell me. I read every one.