Executive summary
As artificial intelligence becomes more sophisticated and accessible, leaders are discovering that it offers more than just improved efficiency – it could enhance their capacity for empathy and wisdom. This development challenges our normative assumptions about technology’s role in the workplace and suggests an intriguing possibility: that AI might help us become more effective, more human leaders.
- Unlike traditional workplace tools, which remain passive until activated, AI systems can initiate interaction, anticipate needs, and engage in ongoing dialogue.
- AI can enhance a leader’s judgment skills, emotional intelligence, and social powers, enabling better decision-making and employee relationships.
- “Through strategic application of AI systems and tools, leaders can cultivate their best human qualities and human areas of leadership,” says Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture.
- While AI can significantly boost productivity, certain elements of leadership remain distinctly human and cannot be replicated by machines.
- Successful implementation of AI in leadership requires a robust ethical framework, including clear principles, practical policies, and governance structures.
We stand at the threshold of a new era in leadership, where success will be defined not by choosing between human wisdom and artificial intelligence, but by bringing them together in meaningful ways. The future belongs to leaders who can harness AI’s capabilities while preserving and strengthening the human connections that drive organisational success.
Since the dawn of civilization, humans have sought to innovate in the workplace with one consistent goal: to save time and increase efficiency. Each new breakthrough – from the simplest lever to the most sophisticated computer – has reshaped not just how we work but also how we organise our societies and economies. The invention of now-rudimentary manufacturing equipment, for example, set in motion the Industrial Era. Now, the proliferation of AI within the workplace has marked the dawn of another era, which some have described as the ‘age of augmentation’.
What makes this era fundamentally different from any that preceded it is the nature of the tools at our disposal. Until now, our tools – no matter how sophisticated – have been essentially passive instruments. A shovel cannot dig a hole on its own; an email can’t compose and send itself. For the first time in human history, we’ve created tools that can initiate interaction, anticipate our needs, and actively engage with us in ongoing dialogue.
AI systems don’t simply wait for instructions – they observe patterns, generate insights, propose solutions, and even question assumptions. They can adapt to individual working styles, learn from mistakes, and continuously evolve their capabilities. While conversations about AI often centre on productivity gains and efficiency metrics, there is one potential benefit that often goes overlooked – its ability to make us better leaders. So, how can AI improve the effectiveness of leaders? By extension, could its impact stretch beyond analytics and decision-making into the more intangible aspects of good leadership like emotional intelligence?
The AI-augmented leader
AI offers numerous ways for leaders to improve efficiency and productivity – streamlining their daily activities, improving decision-making, and personalising employee feedback.
A typical day in the life of a leader is filled with mundane administrative tasks – scheduling meetings, responding to emails, organising documents, and managing calendars – all of which consume precious time that could have otherwise been spent on higher-value activities like strategic thinking and innovation. This is where AI comes in. By delegating some of these responsibilities to AI-powered virtual assistants, leaders can reclaim significant portions of their day to concentrate on achieving broader organisational goals, nurturing talent, and driving strategic initiatives.
Decision making is another key area where AI can offer appreciable help to leaders. Instead of relying on limited historical data, personal experience, and intuition, leaders can now use AI to process massive amounts of information from a wide range of sources and obtain a much clearer picture of what’s happening in their business. AI systems can identify subtle connections between seemingly unrelated factors – from production schedules to quality metrics to employee engagement levels – that might otherwise go unnoticed and help leaders make better-informed decisions. While having this kind of insight shouldn’t be viewed as a substitute for a leader’s judgment or experience, it can certainly give them better information to work with when making tough calls.
Perhaps the most meaningful change is in how leaders can use AI to deliver more personalised feedback to their employees. Traditional performance reviews have always been somewhat awkward affairs – often too subjective, biased, and simply too general to drive real growth. AI tools can change this by helping leaders analyse each employee’s individual performance and identify their strengths and weaknesses. This approach allows leaders to provide guidance that resonates on an individual level, acknowledging individual achievements while offering targeted suggestions for growth. The result is a more engaging workplace culture where employees feel truly seen and supported in their professional development journey.
How leaders are leveraging AI
Whether it’s used to evaluate investment applications, generate financial reports, or write employee performance reviews, AI is already making a difference for leaders worldwide.
Around the world, leaders have proven quick to recognise AI’s potential, and many have already made it a key component of their leadership practice. Among them is Ahmed Ezzat, chief financial officer of venture capital and private equity company Impact46. One of his main responsibilities is to evaluate investment applications submitted by companies from various sectors, identify their strengths and weaknesses, and assess the proposed business model’s viability. In the past, this process would have largely been conducted manually, making it very time-consuming and tiresome. Looking to expedite the process, Ezzat has turned to generative AI for help.
Now, when a company submits a proposal, Ezzat first instructs ChatGPT to conduct the initial assessment and then analyse the proposed business model using the Strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats (SWOT) framework for analysis. In many cases, the insights produced by AI turn out to be surprisingly perceptive. While it’s true that the ideas weren’t particularly original or something that an executive with his experience wouldn’t have been able to come up with on his own, the AI was able to raise some valuable points and establish a link between the project in question and other similar ideas. It also managed to significantly accelerate the process, accomplishing within seconds what would have taken Ezzat hours to do.
Luke Tomaszewski, chief executive officer at real estate photography platform ProxyPics, is another major proponent of leadership AI. Part of his work involves responding to requests for information or proposals sent by prospective clients keen to work with the company. The problem is, each of those forms can contain anywhere between 50 and 250 questions. To make matters worse, in order to provide answers to those questions, Tomaszewski typically needs to communicate with multiple departments spread throughout the company, which is inherently massively time-consuming. To streamline the process, he decided to upload all the necessary information into an AI. So, the next time he needs to fill out a form, he can simply ask the AI to retrieve the relevant information almost instantly. Tomaszewski estimates that this has allowed him to cut the time he spends filling out questionnaires by a startling 40%.
Saving time and money
AI can also come in handy when you need to create financial reports, as Max Koby, chief executive officer of tech company Abstrax recently found out. When asked to create a Q3 investor update, he uploaded the company’s latest financial data into OpenAI’s latest generative AI model and asked it for help creating the report. First, he instructed the AI to generate a report format that would include everything investors could want to know, before using the company’s data to fill it out. Koby figures that this saved him about four hours of work. However, it’s still necessary to review the AI’s output before you send anything out: “There’s still going to be hallucinations in there and things that aren’t correct,” he says. “You definitely have to edit. It gets you probably 85% of the way there.”
Every year, Stacy Jones, chief executive officer of brand partnerships agency Hollywood Branded, is required to write performance reviews for all her employees. Now, you may not be surprised to learn she also tried automating the process with AI. After uploading employee HR reviews, she asked the AI to generate personalised reports, highlighting individual strengths and weaknesses, as well as opportunities for professional development. Jones noted that the results were surprisingly in-depth and thoughtful, and were met with approval from employees. “It took a typically emotional moment and turned it into a really valuable opportunity to connect,” says Jones. “The team responded really positively to the depth and specificity of the feedback.” She also estimated that the process saved around 16 hours of work per employee.
“Through strategic application of AI systems and tools, leaders can cultivate their best human qualities and human areas of leadership.”
Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture
Making leaders more human
AI can help leaders significantly enhance their cognitive, emotional, and social powers, allowing them to make the work experience more positive for the people they lead.
When thoughtfully integrated into leadership practice, AI doesn’t just make leaders more efficient; it can also help them become wiser, more empathetic, and ultimately more human. Now, the idea that AI could make somebody more human might seem a little counterintuitive at first. After all, we tend to treat the domains of technology and humans as entirely separate things.
When it comes to leadership, however, there are a growing number of experts who believe precisely the opposite. “With the power, promise, and potential of AI, leaders have a rare opportunity of rethinking and redefining how we work and how we lead,” explains Nhlamu Dlomu, global head of people at KPMG. “We can choose to make the experience of work more positive for ourselves and the people we lead and simultaneously improve financial results.”
So, how exactly can AI make leaders more ‘human’? Well, it can strengthen your decision-making powers for one. After all, you can process larger amounts of information in a shorter period of time if a portion of it is being automated. What’s more, AI could also give your emotional intelligence a boost, enabling you to better understand people working under you and offering valuable advice on how best to meet their needs.
Many leaders today have difficulties identifying the emotions of their team members and often miss important cues in personal interactions. AI’s advanced natural language processing and emotion recognition capabilities can detect subtle shifts in tone and word choice that might indicate changes in an employee’s engagement or wellbeing and flag potential concerns before they escalate. This enables you to obtain valuable insights into each employee’s emotional state and respond with greater empathy.
Last but not least, AI can enhance your social powers within the workplace. When applied thoughtfully, AI can help you gain a deeper understanding of team dynamics, encourage diverse perspectives, and create a safe environment where people are comfortable sharing their thoughts. “Through strategic application of AI systems and tools, leaders can cultivate their best human qualities and human areas of leadership,” says Paul Daugherty, chief technology and innovation officer at Accenture.
Best of both worlds
One thing to keep in mind is that AI alone won’t be enough to make you a better leader. Many leaders today make the mistake of relying exclusively on AI while ignoring their personal development. If you really want to take your leadership skills to the next level, you need to combine the best of both worlds, pairing AI’s superior analytical abilities with inherently human qualities like awareness, wisdom, and compassion. So, what might this look like in practice?
Let’s say you’re a leader who needs to have a difficult conversation with one of your employees but you’re not sure how best to approach it. Typically, the first step is to put things in perspective and provide context for the conversation, outlining why it’s necessary and what the desired outcome might be. Fully aware that your own inherent biases and emotions may cloud your judgment, you then bring in the AI to help you analyse the situation and the person in question and offer suggestions on how to approach the matter.
You may even ask the AI to roleplay various scenarios with you so that you can get a better sense of how the conversation might play out. However, it’s important not to take AI’s output at face value. While AI itself may not be biased, the data it’s trained on may very well be and that can be reflected in its responses. At this point, you need to reach back inside and use your own wisdom to critically assess the AI’s answers before you engage in a conversation with the employee. After all, it’s a tool – not a one-size-fits-all solution.
Balancing automation with human touch
While AI can certainly make us more efficient and productive, there are still certain elements of a thriving workplace culture that machines cannot replicate.
Clearly, there are numerous advantages for leaders looking to adopt AI. At the same time, there are certain aspects of a thriving workplace culture that remain distinctly human and cannot be replicated by a machine. Obviously, the most effective leaders demonstrate emotional intelligence far beyond the capabilities of any AI. They sense the unspoken concerns beneath a team member’s hesitation, navigate the complex emotional currents of organisational change, and provide authentic recognition that validates not just performance but personhood. When an employee faces personal challenges or professional setbacks, algorithmic responses – however well-crafted – cannot deliver the empathetic presence that creates lasting engagement and commitment.
Similarly, the business landscape is dotted with examples of breakthroughs that emerged not from analytics but from human intuition – that capacity to perceive possibilities that lie beyond established patterns. While AI excels within defined parameters, human judgment navigates ambiguity and recognises contextual subtleties that defy quantification. The executive who senses when to abandon an established strategy, invest in an unproven approach, or champion an unconventional talent employs a form of intelligence that transcends computational capability. Organisations that delegate these judgment calls entirely to artificial systems risk missing out on the next big breakthrough that could propel them to the very top of their respective field.
Perhaps most importantly, an AI cannot help build trust – a key ingredient in any successful workplace. Sure, AI may be able to facilitate communication between employees and measure performance metrics, but it cannot generate the authentic leadership presence that inspires confidence. When teams navigate uncertainty, they look to leaders who demonstrate consistency between words and actions and who honour their commitments even when circumstances change. Without these human touchpoints, workplace relationships become transactional exchanges rather than meaningful collaborations, ultimately compromising both cultural integrity and business results.
Learnings
So what’s the big takeaway here? It could be argued that the integration of AI into leadership practice represents a pivotal moment in the evolution of workplace technology. For centuries, we’ve elevated leaders based on their capacity to analyse data, weigh options, and make sound judgments under pressure. But as AI continues to demonstrate its superiority over humans when it comes to crunching numbers and making optimal decisions, we are witnessing a profound transformation in what it means to lead.
Skills once considered peripheral to leadership – empathy, emotional intelligence, storytelling, and ethical thinking – are becoming central to it. Meanwhile, the analytical skills that were once treated as prerequisites for effective leadership are increasingly being delegated to machines. In a world where AI can optimise nearly every process, a successful leader will be one who demonstrates the ability to inspire collective purpose and foster genuine human connection.
