AI Can Replace Your IQ. It Can't Replace Your EQ.
AI is doing the IQ work. Your EQ is what companies can't replace.
AI Can Replace Your IQ. It Can't Replace Your EQ.
Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic said something on a recent podcast that stopped me cold.
He's the Chief Science Officer at Russell Reynolds. Fifteen books. TED talks. Former CEO of Hogan Assessments. One of the most credentialed people alive on the science of leadership.
Here's what he said, plain:
"The IQ part of leadership can be outsourced to AI. But you still need to provide the EQ."
That one sentence explains everything happening in the executive job market right now.
The Layer That's Being Eliminated
Companies aren't eliminating leadership. Let's be clear about that.
What they're eliminating is the analytical layer — the reporting, the forecasting, the synthesis, the pattern recognition. The work that used to require a sharp mind and ten years of industry context. AI does that work faster, cheaper, and without a bad quarter.
Which means if your value proposition as an executive is "I analyze data and tell people what to do," you have a problem.
That's not a future problem. That's a now problem.
The executives struggling in their search right now — sending applications, getting no responses, watching opportunities go to people with thinner resumes — most of them are leading with IQ on their positioning. Titles. Budgets managed. Teams led. Analytics run.
The market has already moved on from valuing those things in isolation.
What AI Can't Do
AI can generate a 47-slide strategic analysis in four minutes. It can model three market expansion scenarios before lunch. It can synthesize two years of customer feedback into a prioritized action list while you're in a meeting.
What it cannot do is walk into a room full of scared people and make them believe the plan will work.
It cannot read the unspoken politics between two VPs who've been fighting over budget for eighteen months. It cannot build the coalition that gets the resistant CFO to sign off. It cannot earn trust from a team that's been burned by three leadership changes in two years.
It cannot recognize that your highest performer is three weeks from quitting because something is wrong at home — and do the thing that keeps them.
That's EQ.
Not a soft skill. Not the warm and fuzzy counterpart to real business skills. The actual mechanism by which humans move other humans to act.
The executives who understand that their job is now to translate what AI produces into outcomes humans will actually follow — those executives are becoming exponentially more valuable. The ones still positioning around the analytical layer are getting commoditized.
The Domain Translator
There's a role emerging in every company right now. Nobody has officially named it. Nobody has a job description for it yet. But the hiring conversations are happening, and they sound like this:
"We need someone who understands our industry deeply, can work with AI tools fluently, and can take what those tools produce and get our people to actually execute on it."
That's the Domain Translator.
The person who bridges the gap between what AI can generate and what a human organization can absorb and act on. They're not the AI expert. They're not the data scientist. They're the leader with enough domain expertise to know if the AI's output is right, enough EQ to know how to present it to the organization, and enough credibility to get buy-in when the answer is uncomfortable.
This is the highest-value role in most companies right now — and most companies don't know they're hiring for it yet.
What This Means If You're in a W-2 Role
If you're currently employed and wondering how to position yourself for both security and advancement, this is the frame.
The executives who are promotion-track and layoff-proof in 2026 are the ones who have made themselves the human bridge between AI capability and organizational execution. They're not fighting the tools. They're not pretending nothing has changed. And they're not handing everything to AI and wondering why leadership doesn't trust their judgment anymore.
They're the ones who use the tools, filter the output through years of domain expertise and organizational knowledge, and then do the hard human work of getting people aligned.
Positioning yourself this way requires two things: a clear narrative about what you're doing and why it matters, and visible proof points that demonstrate it working.
The narrative sounds like: "My job is to make sure this organization actually captures the value that AI makes possible — not just theoretically, but operationally."
Most organizations are full of people who can generate AI output. Very few have people who can make that output land. Be that person.
What This Means If You're Building a Fractional Practice
The same insight opens a different door.
If you're a senior executive who's been laid off, or considering an exit from W-2 employment, the Domain Translator concept is the foundation of a $200K–$500K fractional practice.
Here's the math: four to five clients at $50K–$75K each per year. That's not a stretch number. That's what senior executives who have positioned correctly are charging for fractional engagements right now — because they're not selling their time, they're selling the outcome of having someone who can both work with AI tools fluently and navigate the human organization effectively.
Most fractional executives undersell themselves because they're pricing their time instead of their value. The Domain Translator doesn't say "I'll work 20 hours a month for you." They say: "I'll make sure your organization actually captures the strategic value that AI makes possible — here's what that's worth."
Different conversation. Different client. Different fees.
The Resume Problem
The average senior executive resume reads like a record of IQ deployment. Revenue managed. Teams built. Strategies executed. Reports produced. All of which AI can now do at a fraction of the cost.
The missing layer — almost universally — is any articulation of EQ-driven outcomes.
Not "managed a team of 40." But "inherited a team that had turned over three times in two years and rebuilt the culture to the point where we had our first year of zero voluntary attrition."
Not "led cross-functional initiative." But "got three departments with competing priorities aligned on a single path forward when the CEO had failed to get there twice before."
Not "drove organizational change." But "took a company through a painful restructuring without losing a single critical player — and employee engagement scores went up, not down."
Those stories are in your history. They're just not on your resume because nobody told you that was the asset.
It is the asset now.
The Interview Shift
If you're getting interviews but not closing offers, there's a good chance the gap is here.
The questions that matter in 2026 aren't just "what did you build?" They're "how did you get people to go where they didn't want to go? How did you hold a team together under pressure? How did you get the skeptics to buy in?"
Interviewers are looking for evidence you can do the human work — because they're already surrounded by tools that do the analytical work.
If your interview prep is mostly about quantifying accomplishments, you're prepared for the 2018 interview, not the 2026 one. Yes, the numbers matter. But the story surrounding the numbers — how you navigated the people side of what drove those results — that's what closes offers now.
Prepare stories that answer: what was the human challenge inside the business challenge, and how did you solve it?
The Bottom Line
Look at how you're currently positioned — your resume, your LinkedIn, your outreach, your interview answers — and ask one question:
Is this leading with IQ or EQ?
Is this a record of what I analyzed and managed? Or is it evidence of what I was able to get human beings to do together that they couldn't have done without me?
The market is paying a premium for the second answer.
The executives landing roles quickly, getting promoted, and building fractional practices with real fees have made the shift. They're not just showing what they know. They're showing what they're able to make happen in organizations where the analytical work is increasingly handled by tools.
That's the job now. Position yourself accordingly.
Ready to Make the Shift?
Written by
Bill Heilmann