Curt Steinhorst

A new model for leadership in the AI-driven workplace.

Our model of leadership has needed an overhaul for years. Leaders are expected to make good decisions without enough information, keep up with a flood of messages, be available whenever someone needs them, and somehow still have time to think. More and more of the job has become keeping up.

AI can help with that. It can make information easier to find and take some of the load off. But it cannot make a group work well together. The human work we’ve labeled “soft” cannot keep being left until everything else is done.

In May 2025, Venus Aerospace flew the world’s first high-thrust rotating detonation rocket engine. Whether it flew came down to the human side of the work: did everyone know their own job and let the others do theirs, could they argue without it getting personal, and did they like each other enough to laugh on a day when a mistake could cost a life?

In this keynote, Curt Steinhorst draws on fifteen years working with leaders from Nike to the U.S. Naval Academy and on his work as Head of People at Venus Aerospace to make the case for a leader’s job that gets easier as the tools get better: what comes off their plate, what stays, and how to build a team that will tell you the truth while there is still time to use it.

You’ll learn to:

• Identify work you can delegate or stop doing.
• Reassess what your team needs from your leadership as the work changes.
• Protect the attention your team needs for work that requires careful thought.
• Keep your team questioning assumptions under pressure.
• Work through disagreements without making them personal.
• Make it easier for your team to tell you when something is wrong.