Leadership must be prepared to change
Picture this: A seasoned Fortune 500 CEO sits across from their board, confidently presenting a five-year strategic plan built on decades of operational expertise and financial acumen.
The projections are precise, the market analysis thorough, and the execution timeline methodical.
Six months later, an AI system produces the same analysis in six minutes—with greater accuracy and deeper insights than the executive team spent months developing.
This isn’t a hypothetical scenario. It’s happening right now in boardrooms around the globe, and it’s fundamentally reshaping what it means to lead.
The artificial intelligence revolution is transforming the traditional executive competencies that have long dominated corporate leadership. And for organizations searching for their next CEO, this means the next five years will look dramatically different from the last twenty.
THE END OF THE 20TH-CENTURY EXECUTIVE PROFILE
This isn’t the first time a technological revolution demanded new kinds of leadership. The industrial age created the management structures we still largely operate within today.
Think about the typical CEO profile that’s dominated boardrooms since the post-World War II era. The profile is a product of management as a discipline, McKinsey-style analytical rigor, and the corporate structures that emerged to manage large-scale, global enterprises with increased efficiency and precision.
Often, they are consulting-trained CFOs or operations leaders who methodically climbed hierarchies designed for predictability. They’ve accumulated technical expertise, mastered financial engineering and shareholder relations, and proven themselves through increasingly complex operational challenges.
But here’s the problem. Traditional competencies are increasingly automatable. AI can handle much of the heavy lifting that once distinguished senior executives in terms of financial and strategic acumen.
What remains distinctly human—and therefore invaluable—are historically undervalued skills in corporate leadership.
As someone who spends my days helping Fortune 500 companies navigate organizational transformation, I’m witnessing this shift in real time.
THE NEW LEADERSHIP COMPETENCIES THAT MATTER
The executives who will succeed in an AI-augmented world share characteristics that are remarkably different from those of yesterday’s corporate stars. Leaders in the new era will be uniquely skilled at:
Learning and teaching: As change accelerates, executives will need to be both learners (expressing curiosity about new systems and their potential) and teachers (helping their teams understand new ways of thinking and working). This is especially relevant in light of new MIT research, which found that 95% of AI pilot projects failed to deliver any discernible financial savings or profit uplift due to challenges such as workflow misalignment, inadequate integration, leadership or culture barriers, and other organizational issues.
Emotional intelligence and empathy: Leaders must excel at the distinctly human work of understanding, motivating, and connecting with people. They’ll use skills like cognitive empathy, or the ability to understand another person’s emotional state from an intellectual perspective. It’s a unique combination of thinking and feeling.
Comfort with ambiguity: Unlike previous eras, where leaders could paint clear visions of the future, today’s executives must guide organizations through constant uncertainty. The ability to work in gray zones, make decisions with incomplete information, and help teams navigate ambiguity becomes paramount.
Ethical decision-making: As AI assumes more decision-making responsibilities and the ethical implications of human-AI systems become increasingly complex, leaders will need increasingly sophisticated moral compasses.
Change agility and resilience: The half-life of business strategies continues to shrink. Leaders must adapt to continuous transformation rather than episodic change management. A growth mindset enables them to fail and learn quickly—for both themselves and their organizations.
THE PIPELINE CHALLENGE
Boards are beginning to recognize they need different kinds of leaders, but we may be creating a talent pipeline crisis.
Today’s emerging leaders will grow up in an AI-augmented workplace. They’re outsourcing more critical thinking to technology, spending less time in the trenches making tough judgment calls, and navigating fewer firsthand, real-world experiences that traditionally build executive competency.
It’s a classic catch-22: We need leaders who understand AI but also have deep human judgment. The very prevalence of AI may be preventing the next generation from developing that judgment.
The implications for executive recruitment are profound. First, boards must expand candidate pools beyond traditional executive development paths. The next great CEO might not have climbed a conventional corporate ladder but started their own AI-enabled company, led transformation initiatives across industries, or developed their leadership skills in entirely new contexts.
Second, boards should reconsider the premium placed on industry experience versus change leadership capabilities. In rapidly evolving sectors, deep industry knowledge may be less valuable than the ability to learn quickly, adapt continuously, and guide organizations through fundamental shifts.
Third, assessment processes need to evolve. Traditional executive interviews and reference checks may miss the competencies that matter most in AI-era leadership. Boards might need to evaluate candidates’ ability to work in ambiguous situations, their track record of bringing people along during transformation, and their approach to ethical decision-making in complex scenarios.
THE BROADER ORGANIZATIONAL QUESTION
All of this raises a fundamental question about the future of corporate structure itself. As AI enhances certain types of coordination and production, we may see a continued disaggregation of traditional corporate forms.
If that happens, tomorrow’s leaders will need to excel not only at running existing organizations, but also at reimagining how work is organized in the first place.
The leaders and leadership teams who will thrive won’t necessarily be the ones who’ve mastered traditional corporate roles. They’ll be the leaders who can operate in gray zones, guide teams through radical uncertainty, and maintain their humanity while leveraging unprecedented technological power.
Kate Bullinger is CEO of United Minds.
