As AI transforms the workplace, executive leadership must evolve beyond technical efficiency and management tasks and shift their focus toward uniquely human capabilities.
AI is changing how work gets done at such a pace that it is impossible for leaders to ignore. However, the leadership challenge is much bigger than learning how to use the latest tools.
The more important questions are: What work should change? What should stay human? What are the consequences of the decisions we are making now? And are we looking far enough ahead?
Increasingly, I am hearing a mixture of excitement and apprehension about AI.
There is enthusiasm about the opportunity to save time, improve productivity and remove some of the more repetitive elements of work. At the same time, there is an understandable concern sitting beneath some of the conversations.
If I use AI to make more and more of what I do quicker or easier, am I ultimately helping to make my own role redundant?
One of the first questions people naturally ask is:
How can I use AI to be more productive?
It is a useful question, but on its own I think it is too narrow. A better set of questions might be:
For leaders already experiencing significant pressure and competing priorities, AI could provide an opportunity to create space for the work that often gets squeezed out: strategic thinking, developing people, building relationships, making better decisions and thinking longer term. The question is whether we will use the capacity that way.
“Doing more with less” is already a familiar expectation in many organisations. If something that previously took five people can now be done by three, or a task that took a day can be completed in an hour, it is understandable that organisations will look at the efficiency opportunity.
But leaders also need to ask what happens next.
Does the time saved create more capacity for the right things?
Does it simply result in higher expectations?
Or does it just reduce the number of people required?
These are not only technology or cost questions. They are strategic leadership questions. If efficiency is the only measure of success, there is a danger that we optimise individual tasks without considering the wider system in which those tasks sit.
This is perhaps one of the more uncomfortable questions, not just for individuals now but for the future world of work we are collectively creating.
People are being encouraged to embrace AI, identify efficiencies and find ways to automate elements of their own work. Yet for some, the logical conclusion of doing that exceptionally well could be a role that looks very different or potentially no longer exists.
We want people to experiment and identify better ways of working. But we also need to recognise that asking someone to redesign or automate aspects of their own job purely for efficiency can create a real tension about what that means for their future. Leaders need to be able to talk about this honestly.
That does not mean having answers that nobody yet has. It does mean acknowledging the concern rather than presenting every AI development solely as an exciting productivity opportunity.
A question I think is worth asking is:
If AI can increasingly do the work I currently do, what becomes more valuable about what I bring?
For many people, the answer may lie increasingly in judgement, relationships, context, creativity, influence and the ability to make good decisions when the answer is not obvious.
Another leadership challenge is who is making the decisions about AI adoption and what factors are driving those decisions:
All of those perspectives matter. The risk comes when a decision that looks entirely logical through one lens creates significant unintended consequences somewhere else. This is where leaders need to zoom out.
Good leadership has always required the ability to balance planning for today with longer-term consequences. AI makes that responsibility even more important.
There is another longer-term question I think organisations need to consider.
If AI increasingly takes on junior, analytical, administrative or developmental work, how will people gain the experience they currently build by doing that work?
Many senior leaders learned by completing tasks that may now be increasingly automated. Those tasks were not always exciting or efficient, but they often helped people understand how an organisation worked, develop judgement, learn from mistakes and build expertise. If we remove too many of those experiences, we need to be intentional about what replaces them. Otherwise, we could create efficiency today while significantly weakening the development pipeline for tomorrow.
The challenge therefore isn’t simply deciding what AI can do. It is deciding what people still need to learn how to do, even if technology could technically do it for them.
I suspect one consequence of greater use of AI will be that some of the most human aspects of leadership become more valuable, not less. People will still need leaders to make difficult decisions when the answer is not clear and judgement is required:
Leaders will need sufficient understanding of AI to ask better questions, challenge assumptions and make thoughtful decisions about where and how it is used.
For me, the leadership conversation about AI needs to move beyond adoption and productivity. Some useful questions are:
AI will continue to change, and nobody can predict with certainty where all of this will end up. That makes thoughtful leadership now more important than ever. The opportunity is not simply to use AI to do today’s work faster. It is to think carefully about what work should look like tomorrow, what role people should play in it, and what kind of organisations and working lives we are creating.
Helen Schoeb is an ICF PCC Executive Coach with more than 20 years’ experience working in Investment Management before becoming a coach. She works with senior leaders in Financial Services and has a particular interest in helping leaders think clearly, make better decisions and navigate change with intention.