As organisations transform into increasingly AI-enabled businesses, the biggest leadership challenges aren’t technological, they’re human (see The Great AI Adoption Debates of 2026, United Minds). As a leader:

  • How can I both alleviate AI-related anxiety and fear among employees, and also encourage my teams to embrace uncertainty and experimentation?
  • Should I drive AI adoption top-down or bottom-up?
  • How can I build trust in AI while also protecting jobs and career opportunities?
  • How do I balance quick wins and short-term efficiency gains against reimagining the business value proposition, processes and organisational design for the long-term?
  • How can I both innovate with speed and agility, and also ensure our decisions are considered, responsible and ethical?

Already squeezed by competing operational pressures, leaders need to answer these questions to determine how their organisations move into – and through – the Age of AI. These are big decisions, actions and signals for a fundamental shift in how we operate, collaborate, and create value.

But leaders are facing these decisions in a timeline paradox as we all move through the AI empowerment curve (The AI-driven Leader, Geoff Woods). AI is entering our workplaces thick and fast, already changing the way that work gets done. Yet at the same time, we all know it won’t completely revolutionise our organisations overnight. It means leaders are operating against two distinct timeframes – the short-term productivity gains and early efficiency wins and the long-term reimagination of the organisation.

So as a leader in the age of AI, how can you both lead for the here and now, and lead for the future?

There are three roles that leaders in the Age of AI must play to address the human challenges and navigate the timeframe tension: The AI Architect, The Culture Cultivator, and The Ethical Steward.

The AI Architect: Leading the adoption & embedding of AI
The AI Architect is the visionary who leads the adoption and integration of AI into the organisation, with a different focus for the two timeframes.

As an example of AI Architect in action, earlier this year BT Business launched its AI training to all 11,000 employees upskilling colleagues in everything from AI fundamentals to role-specific training.

The Culture Cultivator: Creating cultures that facilitate AI adoption and organisation redesign
An organisation might have the best technology out there, but it’s worthless if your people don’t embrace it.

Google DeepMind has recently appointed Lila Ibrahim as its first Chief AI Readiness Officer. After spending 8 years as its Chief Operating Officer, building the most advanced AI lab, now she’s responsible for ensuring the world is prepared to receive it.

At an organisational level, the Culture Cultivator’s job is to create an environment where people can thrive alongside AI.

Ingka Group, IKEA’s largest retailer, provides a perfect example of the Culture Cultivator in action. Having recently trained chatbot, Billie, to handle 47% of customer calls, Ingka had a choice about its 8,500-strong customer service team. Instead of redundancy, the company chose to elevate essential human skills and re-train employees in interior design, meeting a customer need that AI couldn’t service.

The Ethical Steward: Taking accountability for ethically-responsible decisions
The Ethical Steward takes accountability for making responsible, values-based decisions in a world where regulation will always lag behind technology.

Salesforce is a prime example of Ethical Stewardship. Their leadership established an Office of Ethical and Humane Use. Not just asking if AI can be used, they ask if it should be. Salesforce believes “the AI revolution is a trust revolution. We build trust into AI through governance, safeguards, and responsible, accessible product design.” Salesforce has designed strict guardrails, embedded them into their development process and sets clear expectations for responsible use across the business.

The Leadership Difference in the Age of AI

In all three roles, our leaders must focus on balancing the demands of today with the vision of tomorrow. The leaders who do this best, the leaders who can make the difference in an AI-powered world will be those who find a way to perfectly blend technological intelligence with human potential. It will be a combination of:

The most successful leaders will be those who can seamlessly weave these two threads together. They will build organisations that are not only smarter and more efficient but also more human, resilient, and responsible in the Age of AI.

How can United Minds help?
We can help you develop your leaders to deliver their roles as AI Architects, Culture Cultivators and Ethical Stewards. We are currently working with organisations at different stages of their AI journey:

At United Minds, we frequently run Leadership in the Age of AI workshops that cover the concepts explored above. If you would like to find out more, just get in touch: [email protected]

In recent weeks, I’ve watched something shift in how the largest companies think about their communications functions: Not a new tool, not a new title, but a fundamental rethinking of how the work actually gets done. Corporate communications leaders are increasingly involved in shaping business decisions, not just authoring statements defending them.

Ask most modern CCOs, and they’ll tell you that traditional media relations — once what the function was known for — is now a small part of the job. The larger piece is enterprise impact: Monitoring, assessing and evaluating how external stakeholders and developments will impact the broader health of the business and its ability to deliver results.

That’s a meaningful change from where this function sat a decade ago, but most org charts haven’t caught up. Many communications functions are still designed around vertical ownership: Corporate comms owns the broad-based external narrative, public affairs owns the narrative to global policymakers, brand communications owns the narrative to customers, employee comms owns the internal story and investor relations owns the financial message. Each team is good at its job, and each optimizes for its own lane.

Unfortunately, in our current era, that’s precisely the problem. Again, modern CCOs will tell you that most enterprise developments no longer land neatly in these different lanes. A restructuring hits Wall Street, the workforce and the media simultaneously. A product recall is a regulatory, customer, employee and brand question simultaneously. In an environment where everyone is media, the gaps in a public narrative become clear more quickly.

A different world demands a different architecture, and the most effective enterprises have figured out something crucial: The modern communications team must organize around the work, not just the function. In my work helping communications teams navigate restructuring, I’ve found that companies do best when they define their work as workflows, via a practice of horizontal collaboration. In this model, the communications function ceases to be a series of parallel tracks and becomes a single operating layer. Corporate comms, employee comms, investor relations, legal and government affairs work together toward a common end goal. The leader serves as the orchestra conductor, navigating what is quiet, what is loud and what is in harmony in real time as essential decisions are made.

A critical structural component of this horizontal shift is the rise of what I call “strong COEs,” short for “centers of excellence.” In the past, a COE might have been a handful of people making tools or templates. Today, they are dynamic hubs designed to scale complex activities like crisis management, employee communications, media relations and creative work. Driven by the extreme volatility and lack of predictability in the external environment, companies are increasingly redirecting resources from decentralized business unit teams to centralized COEs to avoid duplication and achieve efficiencies. It’s a highly practical move: If BU1 is quiet but BU2 is facing a massive crisis, a CCO with a strong COE can instantly pivot and redeploy specialized crisis leads to the fire. This approach not only standardizes operations and eliminates narrative gaps, but it also gives CCOs the agility to dedicate resources precisely when and where they are needed most.

In practice, moving to a workflow model requires several concrete shifts in how teams operate day to day. Decisions happen in cross-functional forums, not via sequential handoffs. This means no more throwing a draft over the fence to legal or IR and waiting days for a response. Issues are owned collectively, not routed by function. The team swarms the problem, rather than debating whose “lane” it falls into. Leaders spend time orchestrating strategy, not just approving or aligning. The CCO acts as the conductor, not editor-in-chief. Teams are deployed dynamically, not fixed permanently to specific business units. Resources flow to the highest enterprise risk or opportunity.

To see this in action, consider how a workflow model handles a sudden cybersecurity breach. In a siloed organization, the IT team alerts corporate comms, which drafts a media holding statement. Hours later, employee comms realizes they need an internal memo. The next day, customer comms scrambles to respond to panicked users, while IR fields calls from analysts. The narrative is fractured, reactive and slow.

In a workflow model, a central “crisis COE” activates immediately. A cross-functional pod comprising leads from media, employee, customer, IR and legal convenes. It develops one unified core narrative. From that single source of truth, the IR lead adapts the message for the Street, the employee lead pushes guidance to managers and the digital team monitors real-time customer sentiment to adjust the external tone. The work happens concurrently, not sequentially. The enterprise speaks with one voice, at the speed of the crisis.

For a CCO, leadership in this context is less about owning the message and more about owning the process by which the message gets made. It requires knowing which colleagues to bring in before a decision is made and how to keep the work advancing without roadblocks or confusion. The skill required is as much coordination as it is traditional communications.

The communications leaders I know who have made this transition share a few common traits. For one, they’ve stopped policing ownership, writing rules of engagement that say, plainly: We consult before we act, we escalate when we’re stuck, we move together and we share a common vision. For two, they’ve accepted certain bare-faced truths about the workflow model: Shared responsibility is often uncomfortable, and gray areas are real, but these are part of the process. Three, they don’t fear healthy tension: In a workflow setting, functions are forced to collaborate and challenge one another, ultimately leading to a more successful outcome.

Some CCOs have pushed back when I’ve proposed this model, saying they don’t have direct oversight over all contributors. For example, many don’t directly manage public affairs or IR, and giving up control feels like a liability. But if I’ve learned one thing in my work helping dozens of these leaders navigate the new normal, it’s that influence without authority is, in fact, the job.

Done well, a modern communications function sits at the intersection of every major decision a company makes: strategy, reputation, culture, crisis and workforce. It should be designed for horizontal coordination, not vertical control. 

The silo model made sense when communications was simply a support function. It doesn’t work in the modern information era, and it certainly doesn’t work in an era where the challenges companies face in the external environment are wide-ranging and unpredictable. 

Most org charts haven’t gotten that memo yet. It’s time to hand the job to a process, not just a department.

Ben Kalevitch is a Managing Director of United Minds.

This article was originally published by PR Week.