What AI Can’t Do

April 10, 2026

Doug Leyendecker

Welcome to This Week’s Leyendecker View

Let everything happen to you: beauty and terror. Just keep going. No feeling is final.
–Rainer Maria Rilke

FAVORITE READS OF THE WEEK

The world is reorganizing for instability
Change is the only constant.

AI is a great collaborator, not a creator
So says MIT.

FAVORITE LISTEN OF THE WEEK

How Ben Sasse is living, now that he’s dying
The former senator reflects on politics, faith, family, and a life cut short.

THINKING OUT LOUD

What AI Can’t Do
It cannot replace true human connection

Artificial intelligence has advanced with astonishing speed. In virtually no time, it has evolved into systems that can write, code, analyze, suggest, diagnose, and converse with remarkable fluency. With good reason, many feel like AI poses an existential threat to all manner of jobs, particularly white-collar jobs. AI will surely destroy entire task categories and likely entire jobs. But to believe it can evolve into a force that can replace most jobs is to fail to see the gaping hole in its capacities: AI does not and cannot possess emotional intelligence.

Lost in the conversation about doomsday AI narratives is how many jobs require emotional intelligence. AI is a system of statistical inference. It predicts and generates query responses based on patterns in data. It does not have consciousness, intention, experience, or drive. It does not feel. Emotional intelligence—the human ability to identify, perceive, interpret, and respond to emotions in ourselves and others—emerges from precisely those qualities AI lacks. This distinction shapes what AI cannot do and reveals which job roles and types of work will endure.

AI cannot fully grasp context in the human sense. Context is everything surrounding a situation or conversation. It can be macro (cultural, historical) and micro (relational, setting, unspoken thoughts). Humans use emotional intelligence to understand and interpret context.

AI cannot exercise genuine judgment. Real-world decisions are rarely reducible to just data. They involve unique circumstances, differing personalities, competing values, human consequences, and instinct. AI can optimize decisions, but it does not possess the feelings behind the circumstances. Nor does it assume responsibility for outcomes.

AI cannot form authentic relationships. It can simulate a relationship, but it is not a true emotional connection. Productive human relationships are built on shared values, empathy, trust, understanding, and emotional reciprocity.

AI cannot originate purpose. It operates within goals given to it by the user, but it does not determine why those goals matter. Human purpose is based on our individual needs, values, identities, desires, curiosity, and ambitions.

Jobs that depend on emotional intelligence applied in complex human environments are more insulated from AI.

Healthcare roles involving direct patient care are prime examples. While AI can assist with diagnostics and treatment, a large part of healing is relational. Patients need to feel understood and reassured. Knowledge enables clinicians to respond to symptoms, but emotional intelligence enables them to respond to the person experiencing them.

Education is similarly grounded in emotional intelligence. Teachers do more than transfer knowledge. They motivate and mentor, and they must constantly adapt their interactions to the intellectual and emotional needs of their students. AI can create curriculum and grade tests, but it cannot replace the human guidance that makes learning meaningful.

Sales offers perhaps the clearest demonstration of AI’s limits. In practice, sales is an exercise in emotional navigation. Skilled salespeople read a customer’s needs, build trust, intuit an effective pitch, respond to objections, and pivot, all in real time.

AI struggles in embodied, real-world environments where physical skill and emotional awareness intertwine. Skilled trades like electricians, plumbers, and mechanics operate in conditions that require understanding the customer’s concerns and desires. A technician diagnosing a problem in a chaotic environment or explaining a costly repair to a worried homeowner must balance technical expertise with emotional awareness.

AI can support recruiting and hiring by writing job descriptions, doing compensation research, suggesting interview questions, and searching the internet for prospective candidates. But hiring is ultimately a judgment about people. It requires assessing character, potential, and cultural fit, factors that are deeply contextual and emotional.

AI cannot replicate leadership. Leaders must inspire trust, shape vision and goals, navigate conflict, and make decisions under uncertainty. They operate within complex organizational contexts shaped by market conditions, company dynamics, company history, and employee personalities. Emotional intelligence allows them to read these dynamics and respond effectively. AI can provide information and assist with strategy alternatives, but it cannot lead people.

Creative professions at their most original and impactful level will also endure. While AI can generate content, it does not experience life, so its content is emotionally hollow. Creative work that resonates most deeply reflects human emotion—joy, struggle, pain, love, longing. Emotional intelligence enables creators to translate their personal experiences into universal truths, which is how art cuts across cultures and time to forge human connection.

Roles grounded in trust and accountability, like judges and clergy, require emotional intelligence to navigate ethical complexity and human consequence. Society entrusts these roles to humans because they can be held accountable and because they understand the weight of their decisions.

None of this suggests that AI will leave these fields unchanged. At its best, it will augment them by expanding capacities, automating routine tasks, enhancing analysis, and increasing efficiency. But the human core of these roles—emotional connectivity and perspective—will remain and, in many cases, grow in importance.

In the end, AI’s limits reveal something essential. Knowledge alone is not enough. It cannot forge human connection. As information becomes abundant and analysis commoditized, the scarce resource will no longer be information or even analysis. It will be understanding and empathy. Emotional intelligence remains beyond the reach of machines.

The future of work will not belong to those who simply know the most. It will belong to those who understand others the best.

THE RANDOMS

The deal Iran’s leaders seek is so far from reality that a ceasefire doesn’t make sense. Iran’s leaders have always used diplomacy to further their own self interests. Is Trump walking into a trap?

Union membership in government jobs is five times the rate of private sector union membership. The government guarantees a lot of jobs. Very few workers whose taxes fund the government are guaranteed a job.

What caused Europe to lose its mojo? It seems irrelevant in today’s geopolitical world.

Anecdotally, private equity presently seems much more robust in international markets than in our domestic market.

Five of the top 10 grossing movies of 2025 were rated PG. I’m guessing parents are taking their kids to the movies to force a two-hour break from phones and tablets. If PG movies are attracting more and more families, an updated Flipper movie might slay at the box office.

Given the amount of investment dollars the SpaceX and various AI IPOs will suck up, will it become harder for private equity and private credit to raise capital?

Which takes greater intelligence—the ability to dominate one’s environment or the ability to adapt to one’s environment?

If it is the ability to adapt to an environment, then cockroaches might be much more intelligent than human beings. Cockroaches have been around for about 320 million years, while homo sapiens are about 300,000 years old.

If reincarnation is real, I want to come back as a porpoise. I’ll be happy with what I have and feel no need to make perfect even better.

ECONOMIC NEWS

Economy

CPI soars on fuel price rise
Inflation ticks up in services sector
The upper-middle class is growing
Why healthcare is so expensive
Student loan defaults setting records

Labor

HR doesn’t see AI as people
How to use AI for your job search

The Lone Star

Houston back on top as Space City
Houston leads US in manufacturing output
Texas lithium on the move

BUSINESS

Finance

Private equity is on the sidelines
Jamie Dimon sees more private credit problems
Investors are pulling out of junk bonds
Loans trading at a discount are in ascent

Real Estate