What Is Left for Leaders When We All Become AI-Powered?

To fully explore the theme of leadership and Artificial Intelligence, I encourage you to read my previous article titled Embrace AI to Become a W.I.T.C.H. Leader (LINK). It provides valuable insights that complement this piece, which delves deeper into the topic.

In the first article, I discussed how ordinary AI tools that are becoming available, can enhance the role of leaders. The W.I.T.C.H stands for imaginative co-pilots – Why, Idea, Talks, Conclusion, and Happenchance – that will transform and empower our meetings, ideations, communications, decision-making, and serendipity.

But once these tools are available and used by every leader, what will differentiate the good leaders from the bad ones?

Counterintuitively, I believe that the more AI-powered we become, the more human we must be. Obviously, we will be surrounded by technology, but our essence needs to be more focused on the deeply human aspects we have.

And, this applies to leadership.

HBR released an interesting article recently – As AI Makes More Decisions, the Nature of Leadership Will Change (LINK) – showing how Humility, Adaptability, Vision, and Engagement will be key factors of success for leaders in the AI era.

I could not agree more with what @Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, @Michael Ward, and @Jennifer Jordan put in the article, although their conclusion looks too polished to me: “Does all this suggest that leadership is radically different in the AI age? No, but there are two key distinctions. First, leaders’ hard skills will continue to be eclipsed by smart machines, while their soft skills will become ever more important. Second, while timeless leadership traits like integrity and emotional intelligence will no doubt remain important, leaders in the AI age need to be humble about others’ contributions, adaptable to the challenges that get thrown into their paths, steadfast in their vision of the ultimate destination on this path, and constantly engaged with the changing world around them.”

I believe AI will disrupt leadership as we know it.. If we add to the tools (W.I.T.C.H.) that will enhance our day-to-day work, all the profound impact that AI will bring to human capacity, it won’t be an evolution, but in fact, a radical revolution in leadership. Time will tell.

Why do I think so? I will try to offer you some thoughts, less of a rationale.

Come with me.

Essential skills* are basically the most important aspects of leadership and are dramatically undervalued and underestimated. We value hard skills so much. We produce studies, books, papers, etc that want to rationalize our way of thinking, decision-making, and executing that, all the rest, sounds complementary, useless, or just a “nice to have.” I believe this to be absolutely wrong! (*) I don’t even like calling them “soft skills” as it diminishes the most important part of our skill set.

Essential skills are what make leaders. Period. But, this is not what we believe today.

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There are books and authors that have explored how our more human capabilities are powerful and, at the end of the day, what makes us who we are: creative, capable of living in society, and innovative. From Malcolm Gladwell (Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking – here), where he clearly explains how we make decisions in a less rational way than we believe, to Simon Sinek (The Infinite Game – here), where he talks about just cause, trust and existential flexibility, to also non-business authors like Thomas Lewis, Fari Amini & Richard Lannon (A General Theory of Love – here), where the authors study what really builds relationships and human connections: love, just to mention a few. It’s clear enough to me that what makes us human is our essential skills. If leadership is about people, what makes us great leaders is also about people.

AI will be the strongest invitation we ever have had to use our essential skills in a world that overvalues our hard skills and thinks that leaders are rational thinkers. Most of us leaders might think this way. Can you imagine a top Fortune 500 CEO saying in an earnings call that they are orchestrating the company in a certain direction because of their guts?

Or, because of their intuition?

In an Artificial Intelligence world, the rationale will be better executed by machines. We humans will need to play much more with our essential skills, otherwise, no one will need us! And we will need to admit it.

Naked we are.

Or, we will be soon.

In the way the pandemic put us naked in front of our lives, work, and families, and we had to face it without any prep time, AI is putting us naked in front of our way of leading people. And, it will happen simply because most of our work today, as leaders, is based on things that co-pilots or AI tools will help us do in much better, less emotional, more pragmatic, and more efficient ways. And when that happens – and it will happen soon – we will be totally naked, with not much to offer to the people we lead.

When you read the phrase “nothing will replace the leadership capacity of a human”, I am positive that it was written by someone filled with fear and in denial. First, there is no way to stop the movement. Secondly, there is a complete lack of self-criticism in humans when it comes to our capacity of leading people. The in-the-roof levels of burn-outs and work unhappiness are just two of the brutal facts in front of us.

The list is immense.

Human leadership is full of challenges and there is an urge for change. I can agree with the excellence of humans as leaders, for sure, but not in the current format.

We will be exposed and naked in front of our organizations and the people we lead. Is this a bad thing or a good thing?

I believe it to be a blessing.

AIntuition or AI-Guts, AI-Empathy, AI-Connection, AI-SelfCriticism, AI-Listening… our essential skills when powered by AI, and used for good and with respect, will multiply by 100s or 1000s our leadership capacity, just because it will multiply our essential skills capacity by 100s or 1000s.

We will be capable of understanding and communicating so much better, we will be able to do self-assessments in an unimaginable way today, and we will be able to access our intuitions, guts, or whatever name you give to it, in a way much more effective than we can do today, we will be able to listen with a presence we suffer to have today, we will be able to create human connections in such a way that we might sound today more like machines than humans. And we will be able to access our shadows, our fears, and our evil sentiments too, and have better tools to deal with them.

The industrial revolution gave us wings, wheels, speed, etc etc. The AI revolution is giving us creativity, imagination, criticism, and innovation. And is bringing all this in a magical way, that the fear of the moment doesn’t let us see.

There is a rationale I am trying to offer here, but, being dramatically honest, a  lot of what I am writing here is purely based on what I feel. As a creative person, a blank page absolutely excites me and I am letting my brain and my heart fly here.

With no intention to be right, but to be provocative and open. As my own exercise is to be open.

Imagine a world where our essential skills are the most important competencies we have, combined with the chance of being naked and invited to review all our values and knowledge, including our beliefs, prejudice, and bias, and, finally, where our more profound capacities like intuition, empathy, and human connections are exponentially enhanced? Isn’t this a world that we would like to live in?

I can see it being scary once it is completely different from all we know, but isn’t it a fascinating possibility?

I think it is.

Will it be bad or good? It depends on the way we react to it.

For those who are open to change and embrace it as an opportunity for change, I believe it will be just amazing. Why? Because AI will help us be more human, our integrity will increase and we will feel much better about our roles and lives as leaders. After being naked, we will be able to dress lighter, be more ourselves and care much more about what matters: people.

Aren’t there immense challenges for it to happen? Oh, yes, absolutely. And the most important one is us!

A few years ago I saw a provocation at an event, it was something like this: “What if.. the biggest problem in our world – was you?”

In the Artificial intelligence revolution, you might be the biggest challenge to yourself if you don’t open to unlearning, un-building, and unknowing.

Your beliefs will be profoundly questioned and if you deeply believe this will be bad, for you it will.