Frontline AI Leadership: Machines Do. Managers Decide. Leaders Develop.

Why this talk matters now

Leadership happens in conversations: asking what someone wants to become, recognizing a contribution, giving difficult feedback, and keeping a promise to help.

AI gives leaders new ways to prepare for those moments. It can help organize what a person has shared, suggest a question, or reveal an assumption worth checking. Used thoughtfully, it can support the attention leaders bring to their people.

Jon Harmeling’s Frontline AI Leadership keynote makes those applications concrete. He draws on his experience leading a restaurant team and using AI to keep individual goals and overlooked contributions in view.

The framework is simple:

Machines do. Managers decide. Leaders develop.

The purpose is to help leaders invest in another person’s growth. AI supports the preparation. The leader owns the relationship, the judgment, and the follow-through.

The Frontline AI Leadership Framework

Machines do.

Use AI to support preparation and keep useful context in view.

Prepare thoughtful questions. Start with a goal or concern the employee has shared.
Consider another perspective. Explore what you may be missing before a difficult conversation.
Surface assumptions. Ask which parts of your interpretation need to be checked with the person.
Support follow-through. Keep agreed commitments available for the next conversation.

Managers decide.

AI can suggest. Accountability stays human.

Verify the context. A confident answer may be wrong or incomplete.
Ask the person. Let the employee explain their priorities and experience.
Own the decision. Use your judgment about fairness, boundaries, and consequences.
Keep the relationship personal. Deliver feedback and recognition yourself.

Leaders develop.

Turn preparation into attention and action.

Listen for what matters. Understand the person’s aspirations before proposing a plan.
Recognize specific contributions. Notice the people whose efforts are easy to overlook.
Agree on a useful next step. Connect development to something the employee wants to work toward.
Keep your commitment. Return to the conversation and ask what support is needed next.

The practice behind the message

In his published Franchise Secrets interview, Jon discusses using AI to track individual goals and identify overlooked employees. In a separate field note, he describes how asking who deserved recognition surfaced a team member’s quiet contribution. He followed through with a personal thank-you.

The goals and coaching practice connects those documented accounts to an approach leaders can apply. Jon tracks employee goals, progress, and accomplishments in an internal goals database.

Jon also brings the limits of the tools and his own judgment into the discussion. An AI suggestion is a starting point for a question. A person’s experience supplies context the model may be missing.

Human Reinvestment

AI can also save administrative time. Human Reinvestment means deliberately putting some of that capacity into coaching, recognition, and development.

Make room on the calendar for the leadership work you have committed to do. Then ask whether you followed through and whether the person found the support useful.

What the audience experiences

The audience works through practical applications: preparing for a coaching conversation, examining an assumption before giving feedback, noticing a contribution, and planning a development follow-up. Examples are grounded in Jon’s restaurant experience and adapted to the room.

Every attendee identifies:

One person whose goal or perspective they need to understand better.
One conversation AI can help them prepare, with context they must verify.
One leadership commitment and a date to revisit it with that person.

The closing turns those choices into a 30-day plan. The audience leaves with a framework they can remember and a human action they can take the next day.

How I customize for your audience

Before the event, we run a 30-minute preparation call. I learn your audience’s leadership priorities, experience with AI, and the conversations they find hardest to get right.

For franchise, restaurant, hospitality, and retail audiences, we connect the applications to developing frontline employees, operators, and future location leaders. For other people-intensive organizations, we choose relevant applications while keeping my firsthand stories grounded in my own experience.

For executive offsites, the keynote can expand into a half-day workshop ($5,000 added to a keynote, or $10,000 on its own) where leaders prepare questions, examine their assumptions, and build a coaching and follow-through plan. Smaller leadership teams can book the 90-minute leadership team session ($10,000), which adds time for discussion.

Customization is included in the fee. See fees and formats.