Steve Karp is Chief Innovation Officer at Unanet with 30+ years of experience in enterprise software, fintech and product innovation.
As a business leader here in the AI era, you now have a shadow workforce at your fingertips: AI agents to perform a wide range of tasks autonomously on your behalf. You can tell one to take a first cut at drafting a presentation for an upcoming conference, for example, another to propose a product pricing structure and another to explain why certain company KPIs moved in the direction they did.
As important as it is to understand how to prompt and direct AI agents, and generally how to maximize the value of the AI tools at hand, let’s not overlook what is still a leader’s chief responsibility: to effectively lead people. I would argue that the rapid rise of AI, as profoundly as it has altered the human-technology dynamic in many workplaces and made employees wonder about their value to an organization, has put a higher premium on outstanding leadership.
What qualities make an outstanding leader of people here in the age of AI? Do the attributes that mattered most 10, five or even two years ago still resonate most today? Are there leadership qualities that have ascended in importance and others that have descended? In seeking answers to these questions, it’s important to discern between skills and traits. As critical as tangible AI and tech skills are in successfully leading a business or team forward, it’s deeper-seated attributes that will enable a leader to get the most from their people—and themselves.
While it can be difficult to define the archetype of an outstanding organizational leader for these times, there are certain qualities that, in my estimation, will most effectively guide, inspire and lift people and teams in the AI era. Those qualities include:
1. Judgment/Discernment
As chief innovation officer at a B2B SaaS company, I regularly use AI as a strategic thought partner, sometimes for fairly complex reasoning exercises. For example, it has provided valuable input in my work developing pricing and go-to-market strategies for our SaaS and AI offerings.
As helpful as AI’s input has been, though, I always view the insight it provides as one voice in a broad decision-making calculus and treat it as a really smart co-worker and thought partner whose insight can supplement and augment the input I get from my team, other members of the C-suite, customers and my own judgment and discernment, which flow from instinct and over 30 years of experience.
Regardless of your role within an organization, it’s important to recognize AI’s limitations and not abdicate ultimate judgment to a machine. The data, algorithm and reasoning behind AI aren’t perfect. And as much context as you provide it, it’s never going to have the judgment and discernment that come with experience. So there is substantial risk in accepting AI’s findings as gospel.
The buck always stops with you. The decision and the action to take are yours. If you’re content to push a series of buttons and accept AI’s findings as your own, not only will your decision-making be suspect, your value to the organization will diminish.
The Payoff: Judgment and discernment help leaders protect their teams and organizations from AI-driven group-think. What’s more, leaders can use AI to amplify and refine their judgment and discernment, providing valuable information processing and input for high-stakes decisions that reverberate across an organization.
2. Curiosity
Not too long ago, for the first time in my career, I had AI build a spreadsheet for me. While I could have done it myself, probably in less time than it took to prompt and re-prompt my AI tool to arrive at the right output, I wanted to understand what it could deliver in performing this task, figuring the time I invested would prove worthwhile in executing similar tasks later.
You face a similar decision path countless times a day. You can choose to explore new ways of doing things or settle for the safer status quo. The most effective leaders in the AI era will be those that follow their curiosity to make an already good process, product or service better, to add new skills to an already strong skill set or to find a better solution to a problem. They’re always ready to follow their inner spark of curiosity to see what it ignites.
The Payoff: Because they’re willing to venture out of their comfort zone (and encourage their teams to do likewise) to explore new approaches and new ways to use tools like AI, curious leaders tend to be more effective at delivering better outcomes for customers, faster, which in turn fuels company growth. They also tend to view their work as more fun and rewarding.
3. Intellectual Courage
It’s tempting to assume AI’s output is unimpeachable. “AI can make unfamiliar subjects feel accessible fast. That is part of its appeal,” BCG observed recently. “But CEOs and the rest of the C-suite must constantly ask themselves whether they are mistaking a fluent explanation for real expertise.”
Here’s where the courage to recognize AI’s limitations and make decisions based on imperfect information is critical. Bringing AI into the decision-making process takes intellectual courage. So does recognizing AI’s limitations—and the value of your own experience, instinct and judgment. Leaders must have the courage to assert and adhere to a position, opinion or belief in the face of a challenge, to adjust their point of view based on new information and to depart from conventional thinking when doing so is in the organization’s best interests.
The Payoff: Independent, divergent thinking is the lifeblood of innovation.
4. Adeptness At Managing Change
From judgment, curiosity and courage flows another key leadership attribute: an adeptness at managing change.
By leading from the front with these qualities and giving your teams agency to exercise them on their own, they’ll be more inclined to embrace AI in their work, creating a healthy, sustainable human-AI dynamic inside your organization.
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