Now available — Fast Company Press, 2026

REPLACED

Answering the Call of Leadership in the Age of AI

A book about the psychology and moral courage required to lead through a period of deep, ontological disruption — and the uniquely human capacities that AI cannot replicate.

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By Kari Zeller · Fast Company Press · 2026

The moment we are in

Artificial intelligence is not just disrupting industries. It is disrupting identity.

The assumptions leaders have built their authority on — what it means to think, to decide, to contribute — are being rewritten in real time. This is not a technology problem. It is an ontological one. And most leaders have never been equipped to work at that level.

The Human Element

Execution breaks down at the human level. Leaders can have the right strategy yet still struggle to align the head, heart, and hands of the people carrying it forward.

The Nature of Change

Change is always personal. What looks like resistance is often protection, fear, or uncertainty about identity and belonging.

The Leadership Mandate

The more agentic the world becomes, the more human leadership has to be. Will we meet this moment as passive recipients of change, or as active participants shaping what comes next?

About the book

Not a book about technology. A book about the courage to lead.

Drawing on lessons from history, strategic leadership, and philosophy, Re-Placed argues that the core task for leaders is not to out-compute machines, but to cultivate the uniquely human capacities that AI cannot replicate.

“Kari has written a book that meets this moment with clarity, depth, and humanity. For those willing to accept that invitation, this book will not only inform, it will transform.”
Brigadier General Dana H. Born, PhD
Harvard University

The author

A rare combination of depth and real-world leadership.

Kari Zeller advises leaders making consequential decisions and guiding organizations through strategic and identity-level change. She works at the intersection of philosophy, psychology, and leadership — listening not just to what leaders say, but from where they are saying it.

Her conviction, earned across two decades and five continents, is that execution breaks down at the human level. Strategy fails not because it is wrong, but because the people carrying it are not aligned, not seen, or not yet ready for the future being asked of them.

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Kari Zeller

Executive Coach · Advisor · Author

Military leadership

Decorated Air Force combat veteran. Led operations for an aircraft fleet valued over $1.2B. Led U.S. troops under fire in Iraq.

Academic foundation

Taught behavioral sciences at the U.S. Air Force Academy. Contributed to the Harvard Business School Handbook on Teaching Leadership.

Executive advisory

Master Certified Coach with 5,000+ hours. Founder and CEO of TGN Consulting. Clients from Fortune 100 firms to the U.S. Military Joint Staff, across five continents.

Work with Kari

For those ready to do the real work.

Kari works with leaders where the stakes are real and the decisions are irreversible — CEOs navigating transformation, boards facing inflection points, executives done managing symptoms instead of root causes.

Executive Coaching & Advisory

Premium, one-on-one partnerships with leaders navigating complexity, transition, and transformation at the highest levels.

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Speaking

Keynotes and executive sessions built from 25 years of experience helping leaders and organizations transform under pressure.

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Contribute to the research

The book began as real stories. It is still listening.

Re-Placed was written from lived experience — gathered through SenseMaker, the narrative research method that lets meaning emerge from people’s real stories rather than survey checkboxes. Rather than asking people to answer survey checkboxes, it invites them to share a real story and then make sense of it themselves — revealing patterns across thousands of responses.

The collector is still open. Tell us how the shift to AI is actually landing — for you, and for the people you lead. Your story becomes part of the ongoing research, and some of it will shape what Kari writes next. Your contribution is anonymous. It takes about ten minutes.

Share your story

Takes about ten minutes · Your contribution is anonymous

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Live results

What leaders are saying

The dashboard below updates in real time as new stories are contributed. Patterns emerge from the collective sense-making of leaders navigating this moment.

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Re-Placed Community

Join the community.

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Re-Placed · Chapter 6

The Exponential Landscape

The landscape described in this chapter moves fast. This page is updated every six months so the content stays current.

Last updated: June 2026

📕 Re-Placed publishes July 14, 2026

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The Core Argument

Chapter 6 pivots from the inner work of the preceding chapters to the external landscape. The core argument is that the environment in which value gets created is being rewritten by the convergence of exponential technologies — AI, robotics, advanced sensors, new computing architectures, and data networks — which are no longer evolving in isolation but colliding and amplifying one another.

You don’t need to become a technologist. But you need enough literacy to shift your own context and see where new forms of value can emerge.

The chapter’s signature move is reframing each technology as a portal — a doorway into the new era, an entry point into a different way of living and working, rather than something to master technically. The moment is framed as a fresh ontological vulnerability that comes not from any single AI breakthrough, but from what these technologies do together.

Framework

Peter Diamandis’s framework explains why exponential capabilities seem to appear “suddenly” — and why most leaders are caught off guard. Each stage is a phase of the same underlying curve.

Digitized

Once something becomes digital, it enters the exponential curve. Information can be copied, shared, and improved at near-zero cost.

Deceptive

Early doubling from small numbers looks flat. Leaders dismiss it. This is where most organizations fall behind.

Disruptive

The curve crosses a threshold where the new approach outperforms the old. Disruption feels sudden but was mathematically inevitable.

Demonetized

The cost of the capability collapses. What once required millions now requires almost nothing.

Dematerialized

Physical products and infrastructure disappear into software. The camera, the GPS, the map — all now live in a pocket device.

Democratized

Access spreads to anyone with a connection. The capability that was once exclusive becomes universal.

The Four Domains

The chapter surveys four technology domains. Below is a living summary of where each stands as of June 2026. This section is updated every six months to reflect the actual state of the landscape.

Artificial Intelligence

Large language models have moved from novelty to infrastructure. Multimodal models now process text, image, audio, and video simultaneously. Agentic AI — systems that plan and execute multi-step tasks autonomously — is the current frontier. The question for leaders is no longer whether to use AI, but how to redesign workflows around it while preserving the judgment that machines cannot replicate.

Robotics

Humanoid robots have moved from research labs to factory floors. The convergence of AI with physical systems means robots can now learn from demonstration rather than explicit programming. The cost curve is following the same trajectory as computing — expect robots to become a standard operational asset within the decade.

Bioengineering

CRISPR and related gene-editing tools have moved into clinical trials at scale. Synthetic biology is enabling the design of organisms for manufacturing, medicine, and materials. The convergence with AI — using models to predict protein folding and design novel therapeutics — is accelerating timelines that were previously measured in decades.

Quantum Computing

Quantum computing remains in the early-advantage phase — useful for specific optimization and simulation problems, not yet general-purpose. The convergence to watch is quantum + AI: quantum systems that accelerate the training of AI models. Leaders in regulated industries (finance, pharma, defense) should be monitoring this domain actively.

The Skill of Appropriation

Appropriation is the skill of borrowing a capability from one domain and applying it to envision entirely new goals in another. The aircraft-maintenance example in the chapter illustrates how a method developed for aviation safety can be transplanted into healthcare, manufacturing, or financial services — not as a metaphor, but as a working operational model.

The Convergence Sprint Challenge at the end of the chapter asks you to invent a materially better value proposition by combining at least two exponential technologies, then distill it into a pilot a team could test in three to six months. Worked examples for a manufacturer and a hospitality company appear in Appendix B.

Stay Current

The convergence landscape moves faster than any book can.

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