_{Trust me on this} 😉

AI can now draft your grant narrative, build your dashboard, and produce your board memo in an afternoon — work that used to take weeks or even months. The output might even be better. But there's one question I keep hearing transit leaders ask: “can I trust this?”

In a post-AI world, trust becomes the single most valuable resource. Not speed, not complexity, not efficiency — trust. 

“Is this trustworthy?” is a fundamentally different question than "is this done?", and the nature of trust is changing right before our eyes. For decades, we used time-spent as a proxy for thoroughness. Three weeks of work felt trustworthy because of the effort it represented. That proxy is gone. AI just vaporized it. And in its place, we’re all looking at work outputs and asking if we trust it. 

Did someone actually wrestle with the tradeoffs in that grant application, or did they prompt-and-submit? Did anyone read the 100 specs in that RFP AI drafted to see if they actually matter to us? Is anyone interrogating the assumptions underneath that shiny new dashboard?

Trust is built over time by repeatedly making the right choices when you’ve had the option to make the wrong one. AI can't make choices, so AI can't build trust. Only people can—the very people using AI.

So the question becomes: how do we actually make sure our work is something people trust? How do we turn velocity into confidence? There are three skills your entire team — not just leadership, everyone — needs to prioritize developing. These are the skills that transform AI-assisted work into outcomes people believe in.

Intuition is the ability to know and predict what feels right. It's the experienced planner who reads a  draft route analysis and feels that something's off before they can articulate why. It’s the writer who reads a paragraph and says “something about this is going to turn people off,” before they can offer an alternative solution.

AI can generate ten versions of a grant’s Executive Summary, but it can't tell you how the nuances of how phrasing is likely to be received by the evaluation committee — the political undertones, the local priorities, the things you only know because you've been in the room before. That requires intuition: knowing your politics, your city, your people.

Intuition is your quality layer. It’s empathy. It's years of domain knowledge compressed into a gut check that catches what the model missed. As AI-generated options multiply, we need people with great intuition more than ever — because without it, bad output flows downstream unchecked and erodes trust with every decision it touches.

Judgment is how you decide. Dan Hockenmaier in his recent excellent essay defined it as "the ability to make good decisions under uncertainty."

AI will give you ten options for service restructuring and lay out the tradeoffs beautifully. But it will not make the call. Which capital projects do you prioritize when funding is shrinking? When do you cut a route versus invest in it? How do you balance microtransit, paratransit, and fixed route when everyone's fighting for the same budget? Information isn't the bottleneck anymore — you can pull ridership data, demographic trends, and peer comparisons in minutes. The bottleneck is parsing all of that and deciding.

Someone has to own that decision and be accountable for it. That accountability is exactly where trust lives. If nobody decides, nobody's accountable, and the organization is just executing on autopilot with an AI at the wheel. The agencies that build a culture of confident, accountable decision-making — at every level, not just the director's office — will move faster and earn more confidence from the people they serve.

Influence is how you bring ideas into the real world. And this is where the transformation gets genuinely exciting.

Because AI compresses the time it takes to develop a recommendation, you now have more time to do the thing that actually creates lasting change — socializing it. That could be building buy-in with your board, walking each operator through why this matters one-on-one, or sitting across from a community group and listening to their concerns. This work cannot be sped up by AI. It requires presence, patience, and credibility built through real human relationships.

We've often left influence in the hands of leadership. But now that every planner and analyst and grants coordinator can produce sharper ideas faster than ever, those ideas are worthless if nobody acts on them. It’s not just a leadership skill anymore. Influence is an everyone skill. And we need to be doing more of it, not less — spending less time spinning wheels in analysis and more time face-to-face with the people whose buy-in actually matters.

We've historically treated intuition, judgment, and influence as things that senior leaders develop over decades of climbing the ladder. But now that everyone in your organization is working alongside AI, everyone needs to verify output, make judgment calls about what's trustworthy, and communicate their work in a way that earns confidence.

That planner who used to spend three weeks executing the analysis? Those three weeks just compressed into three hours. But the skills didn't disappear — they transformed entirely. The work now is verifying the output, deciding what it means, and spending real time with real people making sure it lands. Those are trust-building skills. And they need to be developed in everyone, not just the people with "director" in their title.

So if you're managing that planner, stop evaluating whether the analysis was completed on time. Start asking: did they catch something the AI missed? Can they explain why they recommended this option over the others? Did they walk it through with the stakeholders who need to act on it? Those three questions map directly to intuition, judgment, and influence — and they'll tell you more about the quality of someone's work than any deadline or deliverable ever could.

Adopt AI. Adopt it urgently, ambitiously. But invest just as urgently in the human skills that turn velocity into outcomes you can believe in. Trust is how AI-accelerated work becomes real, lasting change.

AI is the accelerant. Trust is what makes outcomes real. 

TransitGPT is where I share practical AI insights for transit leaders. Subscribe if this resonates or forward to a colleague who needs it. And hit reply — I read everything.

Go shatter your glass ceiling.