Leadership in the Age of AI: Future Skills
Leadership in the Age of AI: Future Skills
Publish Date: 2026-02-18 20:42:00
Source Domain: www.europeanbusinessreview.com
By Vedika Lal, Zuzanna Staniszewska, and Géraldine Galindo
Artificial intelligence is transcending its original role as a tool designed to support humans and is increasingly performing leadership functions. What skills and competencies, then, will be demanded of human leaders in this brave new world?
“Our future is one where AI assumes leadership roles.” When Van Quaquebeke and Gerpott, pioneering researchers in leadership, wrote this in 2023, it sounded like provocation. Two years later, it sounds more like description. Across industries, AI no longer just supports leaders, it acts like one.
Rapid technological progress and advances in artificial intelligence and big data are supporting humans in analysing and interpreting large volumes of complex data, such as medical or corporate performance data1. As such, these technologies are transcending their original role as tools designed to support humans in everyday tasks, both inside and outside the workplace, and are increasingly assuming more intricate roles in which they can perform leadership functions.
AI has begun to replace and displace humans across a range of standardised managerial functions.
More specifically, AI has begun, and is likely to continue, to replace and displace humans across a range of standardised managerial functions , such as allocating tasks and resources, planning shifts, appraising performance, analysing team dynamics, determining compensation, and even making selection, promotion, and retention decisions. These changes in jobs and skills are leading to a rethinking of how they are managed.
Different forms of leadership
Leadership issues are at the forefront of considering these changes, but also of driving them forward, and this is evident by increasing AI integration beginning to demonstrate various forms of leadership.
Van Quaquebeke and Gerpott offer a useful distinction: AI can support, augment, or even substitute for human leadership.
Already, it…
