The emergence of AI in corporate life has made almost every professional question what their role will look like—or whether it will even be there—in the next few years. For now, senior leaders may be more insulated from disruption than less experienced colleagues, whose work often involves tasks (from creating marketing plans to analyzing data to writing code) that AI can effectively automate.
But that delayed impact shouldn’t be taken as permission to simply keep doing the same thing. Given the predicted exponential gains in AI capabilities, it’s logical that many elements of a top leader’s own job will eventually be supplemented or taken over by AI. At a minimum, leaders will need to adjust how they engage with and support their employees—perhaps reduced in number—who are leveraging AI tools.
We’ve studied this transition closely—Tomas as an organizational psychologist and author of I, Human: AI, Automation, and the Quest to Reclaim What Makes Us Unique, and Dorie as a keynote speaker and consultant for companies reinventing themselves in the face of AI. Here are four key ways senior leaders need to upgrade their talent amid these disruptive changes in order to not just “ride the AI wave” but actually act as the change agents we need to create a better future.
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1. Understand AI as a Leadership Issue.
Too often, leaders tend to think of AI as a technology issue—what tools should we use, and how can we get employees to adopt them—rather than a leadership challenge. Yet even if AI stopped developing today, which is extremely unlikely, its impact on work, organizations, talent, and leadership has already been profound. It’s essential for leaders to think about AI’s ongoing role in their organization holistically—for instance, by revisiting their operating model, structure, incentives, and even their talent decisions about who needs to be hired or promoted to suit the new circumstances.
2. Know the Right Questions to Ask.
Leaders can’t rely on their tech teams or junior employees to navigate AI on their behalf, like an old-time CEO insisting his secretary print out emails to read. No one should be expected to know the “right” answers when it comes to a fast-moving technology, but leaders need to roll up their sleeves and experiment with the technology enough to ask the right strategy questions, such as:
a. What does AI actually mean for our specific business or organization?
b. Where and why would AI adoption help (or not)?
c. How can our teams and organization go from adoption to realizing actual value?
d. How can we go from automation to augmentation?
e. How should we navigate the tension between productivity and AI workslop—aka efficiency versus quality work?
f. What ethical and societal concerns should be taken into account as the company makes AI-related decisions (such as the impact on entry-level jobs, employee morale, economic inequality, and the environment—all of which impact company reputation and brand)?
3. Cultivate Good Judgment.
In a world where everybody uses AI, and those tools are increasingly trained by the same public data, information and expertise will be commoditized. That means human judgment—the ability to tell what knowledge to use, when, and how—will become even more valuable. Senior leaders need to remember: If their approach to problem-solving and decision-making is to simply delegate to AI, then they are automating themselves and fading into irrelevance.
Instead, ensure you become known for the quality of your insights and judgment, both inside and outside your company. Raise your hand to present at conferences or share what you’re learning with colleagues; volunteer to lead a task force at work or, depending on your company’s policies, start posting educational reflections on social media (“Here’s what I’ve been learning or experimenting with”). A strong brand becomes your career insurance policy; when people have heard of you and understand the quality of your ideas, you’re far less vulnerable to disruption than colleagues who have remained mostly anonymous.
4. Embrace Soft Skills.
Even if AI wins the IQ battle, the EQ battle is still up for grabs. Accordingly, we expect organizations to de-emphasize leadership selection based on technical expertise, academic training, and even functional experience—all of which AI tools can match. Instead, we believe companies will increasingly hire leaders based on “soft skills” that have too often been dismissed in the past, such as learning ability, curiosity, empathy, self-awareness, humility, and integrity. These skills make leaders nimble in the face of fast-paced change, and help them relate to workers who—dependent on AI and interacting with technology all day—crave human validation and guidance from their leaders.
Leadership is, as Gianpietro Petriglieri observed, an argument with tradition, and that argument is now constant, unavoidable, and accelerated by technology. The implication is clear: The leaders who will matter most are not the ones who preserve the status quo, but those willing to challenge it. If your mandate is merely to maintain what already exists, then you are managing decline, not leading progress. The real opportunity for senior leaders is to redefine their role not as custodians of stability, but as architects of reinvention, shaping organizations that are not just resilient to AI, but elevated by it.
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