Welcome back. Earlier this week I sat down with the CEO of an emerging sports team. More on that at the end.

In this edition, I get personal: I share my experience mentoring two young professionals. Plus, I dig into why the case for C-suite mentorship is growing.

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If you were here last week, you’ll know that I profiled Zendesk CEO Tom Eggemeier.

He shared a range of perspectives on the future of work during our interview, but one prediction stood out: There will be more coaching and mentoring, he said.

For context, the question I’d asked was “What happens to a company’s culture when more employees work with AI agents?” Will behaviors like sucking up, or corporate strategies like empire building, go away?

He shied away from my specific characterizations and called out two different tasks instead.

“A lot of times management — I did the same when I was growing up in management — you’re prioritizing, you’re sharing knowledge,” he said. “I don’t think those are going to be as important anymore because you can go into a data lake.”

As CEO, he’s also starting to pay more attention to the people doing transformative work with AI because he’s “learning from them” and replicating their work, he said.

Let’s back up

He’s clearly not equating mentoring with pure knowledge-sharing. The former is about empowerment and enablement. The latter is basically like going online and searching for information.

Also, I’ve been fixated on his prediction because as a former corporate 9-to-5er who’s had tons of managers and managed people myself, I can’t recall the last time a leader brought up mentoring and coaching as a specific deliverable or performance metric to be measured.

Sure, hitting goals and “talent development” inherently require these types of tasks. But hearing Eggemeier call them out specifically sparked hope in me that we’re entering a new era of — dare I say it — care?

-For employees lower on the ladder, “research has consistently found mentored individuals to be more satisfied and committed to their professions than non-mentored individuals,” the American Psychological Association notes.

-Executive coaching is also reportedly “booming” because “the complexity of modern business … is increasing demand for reflection and external perspective among senior leaders,” per CEO Today.

-And while AI can provide up to 90% of daily coaching functions, “human expertise remains critical for emotionally charged, political, or values-based discussions,” The Conference Board finds. (This career coach who vibe coded an app to mimic herself agrees.)

But there’s more.

Kurt Harrison and Suzanne Bose-Mallick of executive search and leadership advisory firm Russell Reynolds Associates, which offers a network of mentors for the C-suite, make their case like this:

“With CEO tenure compressing and expectations expanding, the cost of miscalibration rises,” they continue in their post from April 3, 2026.

“Mentoring is one of the few mechanisms that can proactively reduce that risk.”

Outplacement experts Challenger, Gray & Christmas, which also offers coaching services, make a similar pitch in an April 21, 2026, blog entry citing various studies:

So the answer to my question?

I detect undertones of kindness, but the bottom-line argument clearly leads. I also now understand Eggemeier’s prediction.

🏁 The signal: Nearly every executive Macro Talk has spoken with over the past year agrees that most work will change due to AI. They also agree that humans and human judgment will likely always remain in the loop.

-”Eighty percent of the jobs will change at least 20%, and 20% of the jobs will change as much as 80%,” Sastry Durvasula, chief operating, information, and digital officer of TIAA, told me earlier this summer. “Don’t be overly obsessed or attached to the workflow. Own the craft.”

-Highly regulated industries like financial services and healthcare remain more reliant on human interaction than less-regulated ones, Chris Koehler, chief marketing officer of Twilio, told me recently while he was in New York. And he sees human customer service becoming a unique differentiator. (More to come from our conversation in an upcoming edition.)

But where will human differentiation and judgment come from if AI absorbs some or all of the rote work that used to build them?

🤔 The rub: “As AI automates more routine work, organizations are losing the everyday experiences that once helped employees develop judgment, pattern recognition, and leadership instincts,” executive coach Marlo Lyons explains in a piece for Harvard Business Review.

▶ The play: “To close the gap, companies must redesign mentoring for the AI era,” she advises.

“Make invisible thinking visible … Encourage senior leaders to narrate their decision-making in real time wherever possible,” she says. That means explaining the why and how behind a decision, revealing the math behind a risk evaluation, and creating “teachable moments” from lived experiences.

“Before a high-stakes meeting, a mentor might say to their mentee, ‘Here’s how I’m thinking about this room and what I’m watching for,’” Lyons writes.

“Afterward they might debrief what shifted in that room and why. … [T]hat can accelerate pattern recognition which otherwise might take years to build.”

My own experience

I grew up in the workforce going to the office every day and learning from peers and superiors in person. In contrast, two of my mentees launched their professional lives remotely during the pandemic.

Both have told me how much they’ve struggled to understand corporate culture — its rules, lingo, and behaviors — and to find someone to help them develop in their careers. I’ve sympathized and tried to coach them as best I can.

That’s why I’m so excited and proud that they both landed new jobs this summer. Here’s how I passed down my own knowledge and guided them through this crazy job market: