It is no secret that we are currently in a technology-led revolution. A.I. is upending how we live and work at a pace rarely seen—if at all—in history, and businesses and leaders worldwide are scrambling to keep up. This rate of change has been most apparent over the past couple of years, when the public release of OpenAI’s ChatGPT platform in November 2022 thrust Generative A.I.—and the seismic power of A.I. more broadly—firmly into the public consciousness. In the wake of this step-change, mainstream adoption of A.I. has exploded, with ChatGPT alone attracting over 300 million users weekly. Generative A.I. systems have significantly impacted the global business landscape, triggering companies to increase investments in A.I. and reassess job roles across industries and functions.
But what if I told you that Generative A.I. tools were just the tip of the A.I. iceberg? Imagine A.I. that does not just generate content or analyze data, but actually runs business processes from end-to-end. Autonomously. Intelligently. And at scale. This technology, Agentic A.I., isn’t a future concept or new buzzword—it’s here now. Let’s take a closer look at why and how we might see Agentic A.I. tools upend company decision-making and how leaders operate as a whole.
Agentic A.I. is reshaping team workflow and leadership
While traditional A.I. can process tremendous volumes of data to make predictions and assist decision-making, it is at its heart a tool traditionally reliant on humans to initiate the process. Agentic A.I. systems are not passive tools; they are becoming active agents that initiate actions, make autonomous decisions and dynamically adapt strategies, with little to no human input required aside from initial guideline setting.
To illustrate this with a real-world business scenario, in the pre-A.I. world, an in-house marketing team might spend 10-15 hours weekly performing the same repetitive tasks, such as gathering product updates, writing campaign content and scheduling social posts. The role of the leader would be to delegate, sign off on work and manage the performance of the team performing these tasks. Agentic A.I. can perform all this work autonomously, reducing the team’s human workload to as little as 15 minutes spent reviewing the outputs and approving the next round of work, freeing up the team, and most notably its leadership, to focus on creative thinking, strategy and growth.
Scenarios such as this demonstrate the incredible potential of Agentic A.I. to drastically increase speed and productivity while reducing cost and time spent on repetitive tasks. Soon, team structures will evolve to include a combination of human and non-human resources, including A.I.-powered agents and even fully autonomous, A.I.-powered digital human employees, which accumulate experiences, learn and respond to customer and stakeholder needs through experiential learning, adding human-like intelligence to A.I.
With this significant change to the workforce’s makeup, traditional hierarchical leadership models, which are based on linear, top-down decision flows, simply cannot keep pace. In the future, driven by hybrid human-A.I. workforces, leadership teams must expand their management style to lead hybrid teams effectively. This means combining more traditional, people-first leadership skills with A.I. literacy skills, such as effectively communicating with A.I. systems, mentoring their teams to work more effectively with A.I. and cultivating the critical thinking necessary to evaluate A.I. output and spot any potential biases and inaccuracies.
Power dynamics within organizations are shifting
The continued growth of A.I.-powered agents will mean a widespread shift towards promoting those who can truly understand, govern, and leverage A.I. outputs into leadership positions. For instance, as the working world continues to get to grips with A.I., many leadership “blind spots” may emerge, where leaders misinterpret A.I.’s capabilities and view it as just another tool, not recognizing the strategic autonomy A.I. can achieve, leading to missed growth opportunities or critical failures. The need to truly recognize and leverage A.I.—made all the more critical by the rise of more complex Agentic A.I. tools—will mean more and more leaders coming from A.I.-driven backgrounds, such as technologists, data scientists and A.I. ethicists, as opposed to those from more “traditional” leadership backgrounds that have focused simply on climbing the corporate ladder. In particular, the new era of leadership must prioritize ethical and security concerns when applying A.I.-based systems within a business context if A.I. is to remain truly human-first, which will further necessitate leaders from A.I.-adjacent backgrounds.
Without rethinking leadership structures, organizations using A.I. face significant challenges related to explainability, bias and governance failures—all of which ultimately impact competitiveness and expose companies to the risk of damaging legal action, sanctions and loss of public trust. While select governance and regulatory frameworks are coming into effect, such as the EU Artificial Intelligence Act, A.I. is currently developing far more quickly than we can effectively regulate it, highlighting the need for leadership teams that fully understand the implications of A.I. in business and can make the appropriate decisions accordingly. Leaders who can truly grasp the various risks and impacts of A.I. application, as well as how best to apply the principles of accountability, transparency and human oversight, will mean the difference between success and failure.
New leadership competencies are essential
While Agentic A.I. is progressing at an incredible rate, matching and even exceeding human capabilities in an ever-growing number of areas, it cannot replicate the emotional intelligence, empathy or context-led strategic acumen of a human. Specifically, some examples of situations for which Agentic A.I. should not be relied upon include:
Situations demanding emotional intelligence, creativity or strategic ambiguity.
Complex legal, ethical or highly customized scenarios.
Any tasks requiring deep context or relationship building.
Given this, while A.I.—Agentic or otherwise—cannot effectively replace human leaders, the role of the leader must be modernized to remain relevant in an ever-shifting world of work. Simply put, we must redesign leadership for an agentic future, with boards and executives proactively reimagining existing organizational models, embedding hybrid human-machine leadership, to stay relevant in an increasingly A.I.-driven world. To ensure that A.I. works for us, and not as a detriment, the core leadership skills of the future must also include a strategic understanding of A.I., cross-disciplinary governance, ethical foresight and collaborative decision-making across human and machine agents.
The role of leaders in the growing A.I.-led economy will without doubt shift irrevocably, placing more focus on relationship-building, creativity and leading with purpose which, augmented by powerful A.I. tools that enhance both leadership and wider team capabilities, will empower the truly effective leaders of the future to focus on what they do best: strategy, innovation and connection.
Kamales Lardi is the author of Artificial Intelligence for Business and a recognised global keynote speaker on A.I. transformation
