Hardly a day passes when Artificial Intelligence does not in some way make news. Make news by describing or predicting its impact on our work and play. On our safety and sanity. On our present and future. Make news by emphasizing the warp speed with which it is evolving. And by sketching the scary scenarios that AI inevitably suggests.
Maybe AI technology and automation will turn out like others that we, we humans, have experienced. But maybe they will not. Maybe AI really is something new and different. Maybe it really is better by a wide margin than it was even six months ago. Maybe it really will, as AI expert Matt Shumer predicts, replace not just specific skills but constitute a “substitute for cognitive work.” And maybe it really will eliminate the notion of retraining because whatever we might train for will rapidly be supplanted by it.
Given the speed with which AI is evolving, and the radical uncertainties associated with it, what’s a leader to do? Any leader. Any leader of any group or organization in the private, public, or nonprofit sectors; any leader anywhere in the world. What’s a leader to do when the staid Financial Times has a headline like this one, that seems nothing so much as a cry for help. “Are Anthropic’ s New AI Work Tools Game-Changing for Professionals?” (2/16/26)
As always, the specific answers to the general questions depend on the situation. But as leadership experts have thought about how to respond to AI, they have come up with answers intended to apply across the board.
Ironically, the information is at our fingertips. If you ask AI how leaders should lead in the age of AI you get some perfectly reasonable responses. Leaders should “shift from fear to adoption.” Leaders should focus on augmenting “human capabilities.” Leaders should develop a “culture of experimentation.” Leaders should “invest in upskilling.” And leaders should “focus on human centric skills” such as empathy, judgement, and strategic thinking.
Hard to quarrel with any of these. But none respond in depth or with any originality to the “radical uncertainty” to which I refer.
What then can leaders learn that would be new and different? That would better prepare them for changes as unanticipated as unprecedented. Further, what can leaders do for their followers? How can leaders equip their followers for AI that is “game-changing”? For technologies that threaten truths that feel familiar because they are familiar. They are all that we know.
To these questions I have no simple answer. I will, though, propose this. That we go back to basics. That we go back to the building blocks that for centuries – for many centuries – were considered the foundation of a good education.
What were they? Before all they were the humanities. The word derives of course from the word human – humanities are academic disciplines that center on what it means to be human. As opposed to being, for example, a bat or a table or a machine or a robot. What are the disciplines that constitute the humanities? The building blocks to which I refer? They are language and literature, history and philosophy, religion, rhetoric and art, among a few others.
Those familiar with my work know that I advocate that leaders learn their craft in three steps or stages.* First, leaders should be educated (in leadership generally); second leaders should be trained (in their area specifically) ; finally, leaders should be developed (lifelong). In this post, I am taking education a step further: I am suggesting that in the age of AI leaders prepare to lead by being educated in, or at least exposed to, the humanities.
AI has already raised the ultimate question – what does it mean to be human? Will artificial intelligence supplant human intelligence as we understand it? Will the distinctions between humans and robots remain real and important, or will they dimmish and finally recede altogether? Will robots read the Bible, Shakespeare, and Faulkner for pleasure? Will they make art like Rembrandt, Rubens, and Rauschenberg? Will they be Christians or Muslims or Jews or Buddhists? Will they craft speeches as eloquent as those of Demosthenes, Lincoln and King?
We cannot now know – any more than we can know exactly how leaders should prepare for leading in the time of AI. But what we can know is this. Leaders should play to their strength – which is that they are human. Leaders are human and their followers are human. Hence the virtues of the humanities. They are intellectual and, importantly, visceral reminders of our shared humanity. Reminders that we share things – feelings, longings – that robots do not. At least not yet.
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*See my book, Professionalizing Leadership (Oxford University Press, 2018).