Leading in the Age of AI: Moving from Awareness to Execution

Photo credit: Max Gordon

This is part 2 of a 2-part series on “Leading in AI” by Thayer Leadership Faculty. Read Part 1, “Why Technology Raises the Bar for Leadership,” by France Hoang, J.D., Founder and CEO of BoodleBox.

As Program Director of the MS in Healthcare Leadership & Management at the Naveen Jindal School of Management at the University of Texas Dallas, a retired U.S. Army senior general officer, and an active organizational leadership consultant, I have been working at the intersection of human leadership and artificial intelligence, developing AI leadership frameworks, training senior executives on AI adoption, and researching and writing on what I describe as “the missing middle” between AI potential and organizational results.

Artificial intelligence doesn’t replace leadership. It exposes it. Francis Hoang, J.D., got this right in his article about why technology raises the bar for leadership: the faster horse metaphor he used lands because it is historically accurate and organizationally urgent. Most organizations are not building new roads with AI. They are automating yesterday’s workflows and calling it transformation.

This article takes Hoang’s foundational argument one step further. The question is no longer whether AI matters for leadership. The question is what leaders must actually do, in practice, to convert AI potential into sustained organizational performance, accelerated leadership development, and enterprise excellence that compounds over time.

Most organizations don’t fail because of bad strategy or AI capability, but because leaders fail to provide direction, judgment, and purpose. In short, they fail because the operating model doesn’t support the current environment. While AI can accelerate outcomes, it cannot determine whether those outcomes are worthwhile. Automating old workflows without rethinking the destination and subsequently linking strategies to the desired end state or vision, is just activity.

The Next Challenge for Organizations is Operational

How do leaders actually lead in an AI-enabled environment? The answer is not found in simply purchasing AI tools or mandating adoption. We have spent decades optimizing for efficiency, building organizations that reward analytical precision and technical mastery. We have promoted our best analysts into leadership roles, measured success through quantifiable metrics, and treated the messier dimensions of human work – empathy, meaning-making, ethical discernment – as secondary concerns. Now, as AI systems match and exceed human performance on the very capabilities we’ve prized most, we face an uncomfortable reckoning. The question isn’t whether AI will transform work; it already has. The question is whether we’ve been developing the right capabilities in our leaders all along, or whether we’ve been optimizing for precisely what machines can do better.

We stand at an inflection point that is simultaneously threatening and liberating. The threat is real: technical skills that defined entire careers are being automated at breathtaking speed, leaving millions of knowledge workers questioning their value and purpose. But the liberation is equally an opportunity. As AI strips away the technical tasks that have long obscured the true nature of leadership, it reveals what has always been essential but chronically undervalued: our distinctly human capacity to inspire, to empathize, to make meaning, to navigate complexity through relationship and judgment.

To bring the true nature of leadership to the forefront, we need to close three essential gaps that I describe as the “missing middle, ” which we must urgently address:

1. The skills gap between the technical competencies being automated and the human capabilities we desperately need but haven’t systematically developed
2. The development gap in our absence of robust frameworks for cultivating these distinctly human leadership qualities at scale
3. The meaning gap, perhaps the most profound, is the crisis of purpose facing workers whose professional identity has been built on technical work that machines now perform better.

These gaps are interconnected and mutually reinforcing and addressing them requires more than new training programs or revised job descriptions. It requires recovering a vision of human work that automation cannot diminish because it was never about competing with machines in the first place. The leaders who will thrive in the decades ahead won’t be those who can outthink AI, but those who can do what AI never will: help human beings flourish.

Human Skills Become the Competitive Advantage

Ironically, the rise of AI is increasing the importance of deeply human leadership skills. As routine cognitive tasks become automated, leaders must focus more intensely on:

• Trust
• Communication
• Judgment
• Ethical decision-making
• Coaching
• Collaboration
• Adaptability

Technology can scale information, but it cannot replace character. Organizations must change their operating models to emphasize character, commitment, adaptability, and mission-focused execution. The organizations that will thrive in the AI era will not simply have smarter systems, but will have stronger leaders capable of aligning technology, people, and purpose.

The DEPTH Model: A Framework for AI-Era Leadership

Leading effectively in AI-enabled organizations requires leaders to develop what I have termed the DEPTH model of human-centric leadership. As AI assumes an expanding share of cognitive labor, the distinctly human dimensions of leadership become both more essential and more visible.

DEPTH represents five capacities that no algorithm can replicate:

• Discernment – The capacity to make wise judgments in conditions of ambiguity, incomplete information, and competing values. AI provides data and pattern recognition. Discernment provides meaning and moral direction.
• Empathy – The ability to understand and respond to the emotional, relational, and motivational dimensions of the human experience. Organizational resilience is built on trust, and trust is built through empathy that cannot be simulated.
• Plasticity – The adaptive capacity to learn continuously, revise mental models, and lead effectively through sustained uncertainty and change. The half-life of any specific AI skill is short. Adaptive leadership capability compounds over time.
• Transcendence –The ability to connect individual and organizational effort to a larger purpose that motivates sustained commitment and moral courage. People do not sacrifice for algorithms. They sacrifice for meaning.
• Humanity –The willingness to remain genuinely human in the exercise of leadership: present, fallible, accountable, and committed to the dignity of the people being led.

These are not soft skills. In the AI era, they are the hard skills that define whether organizations can sustain the human commitment, ethical judgment, and adaptive capacity required for long-run enterprise excellence. Leaders who develop DEPTH will not be displaced by AI. They will be amplified by it.

Three Immediate Actions for Senior Leaders

Strategy without action is commentary. These immediate actions represent high-leverage moves available to senior AI-era leaders today:

1. To close the skills gap, conduct an AI Readiness Audit focused on leadership, not technology. The data suggest that 48% of US employees would use generative AI with more formal training [1]. Assess where your leaders lack the domain expertise to validate AI outputs, where governance gaps create unacknowledged risk, and where cultural resistance is impeding adoption. The technology audit matters less than the leadership audit.
2. To close the developmental gap, redesign your leadership development investment for the AI era. Integrate AI literacy, ethical reasoning, and adaptive capacity into all leadership development programs. Create structured AI coaching and debrief practices, or after-action reviews, at every leadership level. Build the bench using the DEPTH framework.
3. To close the meaning gap, clearly define the vision, mission, and purpose of the organization, with clear human accountability at every decision node. Define which decisions AI informs, which it influences, and which remain exclusively human. Reimagine operating models to emphasize character, commitment, adaptability, and connect activity to purpose by creating a North Star based on outcomes, not AI tools. Publish these standards internally so your people understand the boundaries, then lead by example within them.

AI has raised the bar for leadership. That is not a threat. For leaders of character and commitment, it is an invitation. The future of AI leadership will not belong to organizations that adopt technology the fastest. It will belong to organizations whose leaders most effectively develop human depth and digital fluency by combining technology with trust, judgment, adaptability, and human purpose.

[1] McKinsey & Company. (2025, January). Superagency in the workplace: Empowering people to unlock AI’s full potential.

This is part 2 of a 2-part series on “Leading in AI” by Thayer Leadership Faculty. Read Part 1, “Why Technology Raises the Bar for Leadership,” by France Hoang, J.D., Founder and CEO of BoodleBox.