10/17/2026
🎤 Congratulations to Missy Casner for representing Purdue Polytechnic at the Community Summit North America 2026 in Nashville, TN, on Monday, October 12, 2026.
Here are some key points from her session titled "Reclaiming the BIG ROCKS: How Leaders Use AI Agents & Copilot to Reclaim Focus, Clarity, & Human-Centered Work".
First, she asked the attendees this important question:
❓ How much of your leadership time last week was spent on work that didn’t require your ownership, vision, prioritization, trust, empathy, collaboration, or judgment?
📸 [1: The Cost of Busyness]
Leaders aren’t overwhelmed by hard problems.
They’re overwhelmed by everything competing with them.
Of attendees polled, routine, low-leverage work consumed 72% of the respondents’ time. The important strategic leadership work often never gets done.
AI isn’t about speed or replacement.
✅ It’s about protecting leadership capacity.
Correspondence 📧, coordination 🤝, reporting 📊, and monitoring 👀 accounted for 86% of the recurring tasks that consumed participants’ time and energy. Many of these activities could be partially or fully delegated to AI through drafting, summarizing, organizing, monitoring, and information-sifting activities.
AI-augmented leadership is not leadership by AI.
It is leadership enhanced by AI, where technology handles routine work so leaders can focus on people, purpose, judgment, and impact.
💡 The more AI handles content, the more leaders can focus on context and connection.
We have to learn to trust AI enough to delegate tasks, not decision-making responsibility.
📸 [2: Human Leadership Insights]
AI-augmented leadership is the intentional use of AI to automate routine work, amplify human capabilities, and create more time for the uniquely human responsibilities of leadership.
📸 [3: AI-Augmented Leadership Tasks]
Long before Missy explored artificial intelligence, systems thinking, and leadership in the age of AI, she learned a lot from Stephen Covey. His principles helped shape her understanding of personal leadership, intentional decision-making, meaningful relationships, and continuous growth.
As technology transforms how we work, she still believes Covey’s ideas remain just as relevant today as ever.
Professor Casner's session connected timeless, human-centered leadership principles with the opportunities and challenges of an AI-enabled world.
Technology may change, but the need for human-centered work remains constant.
🪨 Covey taught her to put the big rocks first.
Covey, S. R., Merrill, A. R., & Merrill, R. R. (1994). First things first: To live, to love, to learn, to leave a legacy. Simon & Schuster.
🚀 AI is teaching her how to move those rocks farther than I ever imagined.
She said, "This AI-journey is not about technology replacing people.
It is about people using technology to become more effective, more intentional, and more impactful than ever before.
