5.7. How I Thrive with AI Agents

Building Human-AI Teams that Actually Succeed

This year, I’ve been using AI daily and experimented in many different ways in my AWS team. Discovering what works and what doesn’t. I saw leaders pushing to adopt AI overwhelming their teams while I worked with my organization leader to enable our teams and support them with Emotional Intelligence. Today, I’m sharing my learnings and my custom workflow that makes me and my team thrive and be more productive.

You can replicate my tips because it’s not about tooling or models. It’s about knowing how to collaborate with AI.

Hi! It has been a while since my last post. Summer passed, but also I switched teams in AWS.
Now I’m developing AI systems, and I have a lot I want to share with you about
Leading with Emotional Intelligence in this AI era!

In the Thriving Challenge, what started as a commitment to move from surviving to thriving has become something even more powerful. What we learned can be used as a foundation for the future of leadership with AI.

“We can’t be in survival mode. We have to be in growth mode.” — Jeff Bezos

The leaders we’ve grown through this challenge inspire and motivate, make resilient and thoughtful decisions, spark innovation, nurture strong team culture, accelerate growth, and leave lasting legacies. Those exact strengths matter even more now when you’re not just leading humans but leading teams that include AI agents.

This is what I learned while trying to adopt AI from my previous team and from the new one.

What is AI Collaboration?

AI Collaboration is a new type of partnership where we work alongside AI as our thinking partner. You can collaborate with AI in different ways:

1. Personal companion and assistant for daily productivity. Where you ask for targeted tasks and expect quick solutions.

2. Team colleague for complex problem-solving. Where you collaborate through multiple tasks, humans and agents in your project.

3. Coach and mentor for skill development. Where you ask for help and your agent helps and supports you.

In all of these roles, AI is supporting and collaborating with us, and we get the same collaboration benefits we’ve been practicing throughout our Thriving Challenge, but amplified!

But, Is AI Collaboration Only for Tech People?

Absolutely not! While the user experience is still evolving, you don’t need a technical background. The foundation is composing workflows through prompts, context, and agents with clear guardrails. The market is focused on technical solutions, but you can use them for your own use cases. And in this post I will help you.

What’s the Cost When Collaborating with AI?

Besides the high energy cost, just like in our daily work, interruptions and distractions have a cost. Therefore, you must choose your battles wisely when solving problems with AI. Be responsible with its usage, consider the energy it requires, and the time it gets you to do it manually.

The 20-Minute Threshold: If a task takes me less than 20 minutes, I don´t do it with AI. Setting up AI, providing context, and reviewing output takes time, and our brain needs about 20 minutes to refocus of switching context.

Pick the right moments to leverage AI collaboration for maximum impact. Read more in 4 Tools To Become a More Productive Leader.

Your AI Thriving Toolkit

Just as we used specific tools during our challenge, here’s your transition toolkit for AI collaboration:

1. The WonderLead AI Framework

Structure your AI collaboration to stay aligned with your values:

1. Planning: Align AI agent goals with your prioritized values and objectives, as we practiced with personal goal alignment in <link>.

2. Daily Check-ins: 15-minute daily check-ins to review and plan the day with AI companions. Check in with both human team members and AI agents.

3. Weekly Reviews: Assess your team’s progress and collaboration effectiveness. Assess if your team (humans + AI) is surviving or thriving.

4. Journaling: Reflect on human-AI interactions and continuously improve.

5. Gratitude and Celebration: Appreciate both human contributions and be transparent on the AI capabilities used.

6. Self-Care: Maintain human well-being while managing AI-augmented workloads.

7. Discover with Community Support: Join others navigating the human-AI leadership transition. Create AI learning sessions or recommend WonderLead.tech. In the next post, I will share how I am driving AI learning sessions at Amazon in Berlin between organizations.

   

2. Emotional Intelligence in AI Era

Apply each EQ pillar to AI collaboration:

Self-Awareness Tools:

• Monitor your comfort level when using AI.

• Identify when you’re avoiding vs. over-relying on AI assistance.

• Recognize emotional triggers about AI from yourself or colleagues. AI is causing FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out).

Example: When I joined my new team at AWS, I decided to experiment with AI for onboarding. With self-awareness I identified that I over-relied on AI, I didn’t have setup all the tools that I needed, and many times it was taking me more time.

Self-Management Tools:

• Set boundaries for AI usage that align with your values. Enforcing responsible AI practices is essential for organizations to build trust, ensure positive impact, and comply with evolving regulations.

• Practice decision-making frameworks that incorporate both AI insights and human judgment. Human input is what makes AI output outstanding.

• Maintain work-life balance when AI enables 24/7 productivity potential. Set background systems, but with balance. Not every tool will give you the same impact and the time invested might block your progress.

Example: After recognizing my AI execution mistakes, I identified gaps in my tooling and created clear guidelines for my team on when and how to collaborate with AI. Tasks requiring empathy, cultural context, or strategic judgement are better when led by humans, while others need only reviews and small changes. For instance, communicating with customers vs development of AI features.

Social Awareness Tools:

• Observe team reactions to AI integration.

• Monitor whether AI is enhancing or hindering human connection.

• Sense when to emphasize human collaboration over AI efficiency.

• Capture feedback from your team on how they need to learn or use AI.

Example: In my team, I discovered that some members resisted AI because they didn’t succeed in their first tests. But AI tools have evolved a lot in the last year. Adding a mechanism for the team to share their wins made the AI skeptics change their minds. The key wasn’t forcing adoption. It was creating social proof from trusted colleagues.

Relationship Management Tools:

• Facilitate transparent communication about AI decision-making.

• Create psychological safety for questioning AI.

• Build bridges between AI-enthusiastic and AI-cautious team members.

• Bring Collaboration - Your Trust Framework Evolved:

  • Building Trust with Humans: Be transparent about AI usage. Share your learnings and tools.

  • Building Trust with AI: By understanding AI capabilities, limitations, how, and when to use it.

Example: My organization had a very low AI adoption rate. To help, I launched weekly AI Learning Sessions led by Individual Contributors, not Managers. It’s a safe space where we run workshops and learn from each other about AI. Two months later, team members are actively sharing their custom agents and have created more efficient team workflows.

3. My AI Collaboration Workflow

Every week and day, I plan my tasks for myself, team, and AI collaboration. I create the agents that I need, define their roles, and plan together with the AI. Then I open the sessions for each agent, and they start or continue the execution of their tasks. During the day, I check with AI if there are changes in priorities or if there are agents blocked. I unblock them and continue with my tasks. At the end of the day, I review the progress and update notes for the next day’s execution. This is my 5-10x multiplier.

Individually, this is the workflow that each agent runs:

It is very similar to how you would collaborate with your team or colleague, right?

How to Create an AI Collaboration Workflow

Ask to create an agentic workflow for your AI tool and import it in the next execution.

Let me know if you want to learn more in the comments.

AI Tools for Workflows Automation

I tried creating workflows with different free AI tools (Claude, Gemini, GPT), but the message limitations and lack of context were frustrating. Those tools’ free tiers work well for AI as companion or assistant with small defined tasks, but not for bigger and more complex projects. I needed something with flexibility that allows me to focus on human productivity and team interaction.

Claude Skills is an improvement. We need AI tools less focused on tech users that help everyone to be more productive.

AIBelle @ develAGENTS

, a follower from WonderLead is another example, focused on a human-first solution.

Connecting AI Execution to Your North Star

Remember, the discipline of building your career gives you the freedom to become the leader you want to be. These new AI execution tools must always serve your roadmap. Use the insights from your Weekly Reviews and Journaling to ensure your AI agents, together with your actions, are continuously aligned with your prioritized values and goals. Now that we are equipped to thrive, it is time to continue with our discovery journey and define our career next steps in this AI era.

We must use AI to achieve our long-term vision, not just to move faster without direction!

The Future Is Human-AI Collaboration

The organizations that thrive in the next decade won’t be those that replace humans with AI or those that ignore AI entirely. They’ll be led by individuals who’ve mastered the emotional intelligence skills we’ve been practicing and learned to apply them in human-AI collaborative environments.

✅ What We’ve Learned (Thriving Challenge):

• Thriving leaders inspire and motivate others.

• Emotional intelligence drives better decision-making.

• Community support accelerates growth.

• Daily practice creates lasting change.

• Self-awareness is the foundation of all leadership.

🌟 What This Means for AI Collaboration:

• Inspiring humans while optimizing AI performance.

• Making EQ-informed decisions about when to use AI insights.

• Building communities that include AI as thinking partners.

• Daily practice with AI will multiply your impact.

• Self-awareness about your unique human value is your advantage in an AI era.

Let’s Learn Together

I want to hear from you, Wonder Leader!

💭 Share one way you used AI this week. What worked? What didn’t?
The best learning happens when we share our breakthrough stories. Your failure might save someone else hours of frustration.
Ready to continue this journey? Comment below with your AI collaboration story!

Self-Awareness Thriving🌟Challenge Practice

Ask for feedback about your AI collaboration from your team (humans+agents)

Now that you are collaborating with AI, you need 1) human feedback to ensure your new workflow is truly building trust, not hindering connection, and 2) AI feedback to ensure your workflows are successful.

3 Activities:

1. Ask a human peer or report for feedback on your AI collaboration:
   Am I over-relying on the AI? Is my use of this tool making communication easier or harder? Is my code easy to review or lows the bar?

2. Ask AI for feedback on your tasks and how the workflow can be improved:
   Review the workflow you executed and propose changes so that the issue you faced doesn´t happen again.

3. Reflect on the feedback. Use it for continuously improving your performance and detecting blind spots in your new AI adoption. Getting feedback is a gift.

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This post concludes our WonderLead Thriving Challenge. It was a pleasure to practice it with you. Let me know what path you want to take next in our journey. I am also considering opening paid subscriptions to give you more value and ensure consistency.

Did you read all the breakthrough stories of the challenge? You can find them here:

This post opinions are my own, and may not reflect the opinions of the company I work for.