Leadership Disrupted: Preparing for an AI-Enabled Workplace

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Navigating AI Hub

Leadership Disrupted: Preparing for an AI-Enabled Workplace

12 October 2026 / Report

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AI is reshaping work, organizational structures, and the capabilities required to lead effectively. Drawing on international survey findings and interviews with organizational leaders, this report examines these changes and identifies how organizations can prepare and support leaders for an AI-enabled workplace.

Trusted Insights for What’s Ahead^®

AI is accelerating leaders’ work, yet accountability remains uneven. To reduce risk, leaders need clearer accountability and decision rights. AI-enabled work also requires deliberate human checkpoints at critical stages so leaders can review inputs, validate outputs, correct errors, and confirm that decisions remain fit for purpose.
Leaders anticipate changes in leadership models and structures, but current hierarchies remain unchanged. AI transformation offers a practical setting to test more fluid leadership and understand how supporting structures might need to adapt.
Work redesign, not simply AI adoption, is becoming a core leadership responsibility. Chief human resources officers (CHROs) should connect leader choices about how to delegate work between humans and AI to workforce planning, strategy, and organizational redesign.
As AI capability increases, AI literacy, human judgment, and the ability to assess risk become key leadership traits. Critical and strategic thinking, meanwhile, remain essential leadership characteristics.
Leaders need role-specific, work-based development. They are asking for opportunities to practice new AI skills on the ground, not simply to take generalized AI fluency courses. They need development opportunities tailored to specific leadership levels, be they current or aspirational.

Authors

Erka Amursi

Principal Researcher, Human Capital
The Conference Board

Marion Devine

Principal Researcher, Human Capital, Europe
The Conference Board

Praisy Abraham

Asia Human Capital Center Associate
The Conference Board

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