Climbing the High Summits: Why Every Leader Must Master Human Skills to Get the Most Out of AI

Diane Belcher

November 10, 2025

At Machu Picchu’s Sun Gate, a clear view of the citadel can vanish in minutes. Skies that seem calm turn quickly into downpours, leaving the path slick with rain and the descent treacherous. Those prepared for the unpredictable weather are glad to have their rain jackets, but gear alone is not enough. What makes the difference is the ability to adapt and stay resilient as conditions change.

Today’s organizations are climbing into their own unpredictable conditions, an era of relentless disruption, technological advances, data security threats, volatile markets, and geopolitical risk. Within view is an unprecedented capability to reimagine strategy, accelerate performance, and unlock value at scale and speed. But reaching the summit requires something more than high-tech gear.

It requires every member of the organization—from the CEO and C-suite to managers, frontline teams, and technical experts—to master the complementary human strengths that no machine can replace. In the face of unexpected turns, humans bring a kind of adaptability, judgment, and creativity that technology can’t yet match. And it’s these capabilities that make the difference between stalling short of the peak and reaching it.

The Gear Is Critical, but It’s Not the Guide

Artificial intelligence (AI) is the modern expedition’s gear: precise, powerful, and more functional than anyone could have imagined only a few years ago. But the gear is not the guide.

The guide’s role is to read the mountain, adjust the route to conditions, set the pace, make safety-critical decisions, and ensure the team’s resources, skills, and morale are all there. Teamwork and resilience make all the difference, just as in business. Rapid, continuous change exhausts even very capable workforces. Leading through it takes leaders with strong social and emotional intelligence, the ability to create psychological safety, and a genuine interest in people’s well-being.

The most successful AI adoption comes from a distributed leadership model. The CEO sets the tone and embeds AI into the business strategy, but the chief information officer, chief operating officer, functional heads, and line managers must all take responsibility for integrating AI into workflows, decision making, and customer experiences. Without that shared commitment, AI doesn’t get scaled to its full potential.

That’s why AI literacy for everyone matters too. Ensuring that every team member understands both AI’s capabilities and its blind spots helps them know when to trust the model and when to trust their instincts. In a truly AI-enabled organization, frontline employees aren’t just end users. Instead, they’re active contributors who spot risks, surface opportunities, and feed insights back into the system.

Reading the Signs Machines Can Miss

Even in clear weather, strong leaders question assumptions, reassess the plan, and prepare alternatives. They look for hazards the map can’t show and act before those hazards become crises. When crises do occur, they size up the problem with a sense of proportion and draw on their creativity to improvise solutions when necessary.

Just as in business, leaders must cultivate integrative thinking, which is the ability to hold competing perspectives, connect dots across functions, and generate new paths forward. As research from Harvard Business School has shown, the strongest creative ideas often emerge when humans and machines work together, combining human originality with AI’s ability to refine ideas and test their feasibility. This is what turns AI potential into transformative capabilities.

The Partnership That Gets You to the Top…and Back Home

The most successful digital transformation strategies rely on constant coordination between people and technology. Despite detailed plans, it’s the team who decides when to deviate to avoid danger, preserve energy, or seize an unexpected break in the weather.

For high-performing organizations, the C-suite, product leads, operations managers, legal teams, human resources departments, engineers, customer-facing teams, analysts, and even administrative staff learn to collaborate with AI tools in ways that elevate both their work and the organization’s overall performance.

Leading at Extreme Altitude

The companies that succeed won’t just be the ones with the most advanced AI tools. They’ll be the ones that have deliberately elevated the human capabilities that give those tools purpose and given everyone a role in finding new ways forward.

They will:

• Enhance human strengths, developing emotional intelligence, ethical judgment, resilience, creativity, and integrative thinking in every role.
• Build widespread AI literacy, so every employee can partner effectively with AI.
• Share ownership of creating the organization’s future, engaging the leadership team and broader workforce in seeking ideas to leverage AI, not isolating it within a single function.

Reaching the summit involves building a digitally literate workforce, whose human capabilities have also been sharpened. When leaders at every level champion these complementary elements, the organization doesn’t just climb higher, it becomes more capable of navigating whatever terrain lies ahead.

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A New Kind of Collective Intelligence: How AI Is Transforming the Living, Learning Organization

With AI woven into the fabric of business, planning is no longer static—it’s a dynamic exchange between people and machines. This creates a new form of collective intelligence and ushers in an era of the adaptive enterprise. 

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A Strategic Conversation Guide for the C-Suite

10 Questions the C-Suite Should Be Asking Now About Their Leaders

AI is reshaping strategy, execution, and leadership—faster than most organizations are prepared for. 

The post A Strategic Conversation Guide for the C-Suite appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

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Amplifying with AI: L&D’s Role in Scaling Collective Intelligence

Mark Marone, PhD

September 9, 2025

Artificial intelligence (AI) is poised to automate anything that can be measured, revolutionizing how work gets done. Even if AI innovation stalled today, the disruption would continue. That gives learning and development (L&D) leaders two urgent tasks: to help people use AI effectively and to use AI to enhance how people learn.

Business today demands learning that is faster, more personalized, and deeply contextualized. That’s where AI comes in. In a recent Harvard Business Review article by Marc Zao-Sanders that methodically ranks 100 current use cases for generative AI, both “enhanced learning” and “personalized learning” feature among the top 20.

This work of L&D today is critical. By combining AI’s capacity to scale insight with L&D’s ability to shape behavior, organizations can build their collective intelligence: the dynamic interplay between people and machines that enables smarter decisions, innovation, and better performance at scale.

The Amplification Imperative

According to Harvard Business Impact’s 2025 Global Leadership Development Study, 49% of L&D leaders expect AI to improve talent development outcomes this year. Even more expect it to enhance the scalability (50%) and adaptability (53%) of learning programs.

That promise is already being realized. Consider how Hilton Hotels rolled out an AI-powered virtual reality training program for front desk staff. Employees interact with a Guest Service Coach that delivers real-time feedback on tone, word choice, and service behaviors. What used to take four hours of instructor-led training now takes just 20 minutes, and the program has scaled to over 400,000 employees globally.

This kind of amplification is exactly what many organizations need, but speed and efficiency aren’t enough. The deeper value lies in AI’s ability to help organizations codify and share internal expertise, personalize development pathways, and create learning systems that adapt alongside the business and help it grow.

Three Ways AI is Already Amplifying Learning

1. Contextualized Knowledge at Scale

AI tools powered by internal data are helping organizations unlock and distribute tacit knowledge. For example, large language models can be trained on internal policies, playbooks, and best practices, enabling employees to ask context-specific questions and receive curated answers grounded in the organization’s way of working.

A multinational firm interviewed in our study represents a typical example. It deployed an AI coach that understands company values, ethical guidelines, and leadership principles, then delivers tailored coaching to first-time managers. This kind of amplification by AI is allowing organizations to streamline the work of middle managers and flatten organizational hierarchies.

2. Personalized and Proactive Learning

In contrast to traditional training calendars, AI-powered systems can push microlearning or feedback precisely when and where it’s needed. Leaders can receive just-in-time nudges before key meetings. Teams can be prompted to reflect on recent challenges. Learners can navigate personalized development journeys based on evolving role requirements, skill gaps, and performance trends.

3. Learning Embedded in Workflows

The best learning doesn’t feel like training at all. AI makes it possible to integrate development directly into the flow of work, offering real-time guidance, simulations, and decision aids. Instead of stepping away to learn, employees learn as they work. This not only increases relevance and retention but also addresses one of the biggest barriers to learning: lack of time. Instead of logging in to a portal and searching for content, employees increasingly engage with intelligent assistants that deliver curated answers, personalized learning, and targeted support just when it’s needed.

Why Learning Needs to Lead

Right now, organizations need L&D as a strategic partner in developing collective intelligence to unlock the full potential of human-AI collaboration. Yet our study revealed an uncomfortable gap: only 36% of organizations believe their leaders fully embrace the mindset that AI must be central to strategy and operations. Just 42% describe their support for employee AI experimentation as strong.

Learning leaders have a critical role to play in helping to close these gaps. This includes not only helping leaders and employees become AI literate themselves, but also leading by example, incorporating AI into how learning is developed, delivered, and measured.

The most effective strategies blend AI’s precision with human insight, creating a loop where machine-generated guidance is continuously refined by people and returned to the system as collective intelligence. In this way, AI doesn’t just accelerate learning; it becomes part of a feedback loop that strengthens it.

The Learning Function as the Leverage Point

When business models, company workflows, and entire industries are being reshaped by intelligent machines, the ability to learn at scale becomes a competitive differentiator.

Amplifying learning with AI promises to increase the velocity and impact of learning across organizations. The challenge for learning leaders today isn’t whether to use AI, it’s how to use it well: ethically, strategically, and in the service of human growth as well as business growth.

With the guidance of talented L&D teams, AI can enable not just more learning, but better learning: learning that equips people to lead, adapt, and thrive in a fast, fluid, and future-focused world.

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Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused: Collective Intelligence in the Age of AI

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Mark Marone
Director, Global Insights
Harvard Business Impact

Prarthana Kumar
Director, Strategic Learning Management, APAC
Harvard Business Impact

Rajeev Mandloi
Strategic Learning Manager, EMEA
Harvard Business Impact

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Insights

2025 Global Leadership Development Study

Harvard Business Impact’s 3rd Annual Study

In the coming year, respondents foresee three objectives for L&D to develop leaders for future success.

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Build a Change-Seeking Organizational Culture

In this year’s survey, 40% say their organizations are putting even more emphasis this year than last on building a change-ready organization.

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“We use the 4B analysis as we look at the workforce we’ll need in the future and determine how we are going to get it. Are we going to buy, build, or borrow the talent, skill, or expertise? Or does this task get transferred to a button or bot? This kind of analysis is done in every market, every function, every business line now.”

— Head of Corporate Training & Development at a Multinational Food and Beverage Company

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Readiness Reimagined: How to Build a Change-Seeking Culture

Predict the Nonlinear Evolution of Roles

44% of survey respondents say their organization will put greater emphasis this year than last on supporting workforce upskilling and reskilling in their leadership development programs.

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“We have [many] technical people who are strong technical experts, but
with a lower capability in transmitting knowledge back into the leadership.”

— Head of HR in North America for a Multinational Transportation Company

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The Fluid Future of Work: Rethinking Roles in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Accelerate Speed to Skill

Whether learning initiatives are designed to develop a skill, create alignment, improve collaboration, foster new ideas, or encourage changes in perspectives, they all have new requirements: they need to be more easily scalable, happen faster, and be delivered in context for the organization.

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“Taking a broader view that considers how I can strengthen collective intelligence by supporting collective memory, attention, and reasoning can open opportunities to unlock the true potential of human-AI collaboration.”

— Christoph Riedl, “How to Use AI to Build Your Company’s Collective Intelligence,” HBR.org

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Why the Tortoise Doesn’t Win Anymore: Speed to Skill as a Competitive Advantage

Three Strategies to Address Learning & Development Objectives

Amplify with AI

Lean into Full-Immersion Learning

Champion the Complementary Elements

Research Report

Discover how to prepare your leaders to thrive in an AI-driven world.

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Research Findings

Dive deep into the results from our study.

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See how forward-thinking companies are adapting to change and transforming at scale.

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Charles Schwab

Mastering Leadership in a Dynamic World at Charles Schwab

Through Advanced LEAD, a nomination-based program for high-potential directors and managing directors, Charles Schwab empowers its leaders with the strategic mindset and networks needed to thrive in a dynamic industry.

Read the client story

Rabobank

Developing Leaders for Transformation at Rabobank

Rabobank leveraged strategic leadership development to navigate significant change and realize its transformation goals.

Read the client story

Atos

Developing Managers to Lead Confidently through Transformation at Atos

Atos, a global leader in digital transformation, is preparing a global population of change-leaders to thrive amid digital disruption by empowering them with the skills to become more consultative partners to their clients and to inspire and motivate diverse individuals and teams. 

Read the client story

Oman Arab Bank

Building Leadership for the Future at Oman Arab Bank

Oman Arab Bank aims to build a prosperous future aligned with Oman Vision 2040, focusing on innovation, sustainability, and equal opportunities. 

Read the client story

Maybank

Investing in Digital Learning for Greater Effectiveness at Maybank

To rapidly upskill its employees with the capabilities emerging in the new economy, financial services leader Maybank adopted an agile approach to development: They provided their entire workforce with access to digital learning and anticipated evolving business conditions with the most relevant learning resources. 

Read the client story

Previous Global Leadership Development Studies

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In 2023, we launched our first study of global leaders responsible for leadership development to understand their business and human capital priorities for the coming year, and in what ways they are relying on their leaders to meet those objectives.

Explore insights from our past global leadership development studies below.

2024 Global Leadership Development Study

Time to Transform

The theme that emerged in 2024 was the need to advance the practice of leadership to meet the needs of transformation efforts across organizations.

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Explore the insights

2023 Global Leadership Development Study

Ready for Anything

In 2023, we discovered a greater need to develop leaders who are truly ready for anything.

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Explore the insights

The post 2025 Global Leadership Development Study appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Fluid Future of Work: Rethinking Roles in the Age of Intelligent Machines

Mark Marone, PhD

July 25, 2025

As AI advances, human employees’ roles are evolving in unpredictable ways. Organizations must now anticipate and prepare for nonlinear role shifts, where job responsibilities fragment, fuse, or disappear altogether. The ability to proactively adapt leadership, learning, and development strategies to this new reality is emerging as an important competitive differentiator.

To meet this challenge, learning and development (L&D) must not only close current skills gaps but also forecast future ones. This means redefining how we think about jobs, how we develop talent, and how we support leaders who are navigating uncharted organizational terrain.

The Need to Prepare for the Nonlinear Evolution of Roles

In an AI-transformed world, job roles are being rapidly reshaped. Traditional workforce planning models aren’t enough to get the job done. Organizations are faced with the need to rethink their approach to workforce planning and development.

This imperative, which we call predicting the nonlinear evolution of roles, was identified by global leaders as one of the three most urgent objectives in our 2025 Global Leadership Development Study. Alongside the rise of digital labor and the acceleration of AI, it is changing not just how work gets done but also who does it and what capabilities they need to succeed.

For decades, workforce planning has typically followed a relatively linear and role-based approach: define the roles needed to support strategic goals, identify the skills and experiences required for each, and create structured career paths to build proficiency. That model no longer works. Today, leaders must anticipate role changes before they happen and equip teams to adapt in real time.

In our study, 44% of respondents said their organization is placing greater emphasis on upskilling and reskilling within leadership development. And almost half (45%) said expectations are rising for leaders to actively support their own teams’ AI upskilling.

These trends highlight the fact that leaders themselves are seeing their roles change, sometimes dramatically. Moves that create entirely new leadership roles, such as merging IT and HR departments, are making headlines.¹ Leaders are increasingly valued as sense makers who can deal with complexity and guide AI-enabled systems rather than as decision makers and subject matter experts. They are navigating new responsibilities that may not have existed a year ago, and that may change again in six months.

AI Is Driving and Redefining Role Evolution

As AI tools grow more sophisticated, they are no longer simply assisting with tasks. Increasingly, they are performing end-to-end processes autonomously. In many companies, AI has already evolved from the role of helpful assistant to agent.

One multinational company we interviewed shared their use of a “4B” framework to determine how work gets done in the future: Will a task be handled by human talent that is bought, built, or borrowed? Or will it be transferred to a bot or button (AI)? This type of thinking, which was once rare, is becoming common across industries and functions.

In some cases, AI orchestrates entire workflows. Take UBS, for example. Since 2024, the financial firm’s AI-driven service approves loans without human intervention. Credit officers didn’t disappear, but their responsibilities changed. Today, they define parameters, conduct scenario testing, and coach AI systems rather than make each decision themselves.

That kind of shift has implications for how we design leadership development. L&D teams must prepare leaders to take on new responsibilities, some of which may not be clearly defined yet. This requires not only technical upskilling but also a rethinking of leadership identity, agency, and capability.

What’s at Stake: Leadership Pipelines and Capability Gaps

The nonlinear evolution of roles affects more than just current job holders; it upends the traditional leadership pipeline. In industries where AI displaces entry-level roles, organizations may lose the proving grounds where future leaders once developed. Without action, this will create serious capability gaps down the road.

That’s why the most forward-looking companies are redesigning development paths to reflect the new reality. They are investing in tools to model likely role changes, analyze skill adjacency, and forecast future workforce needs. Crucially, they are embedding learning earlier and more broadly to build readiness, not just at the top but across the enterprise.

What L&D Can Do Now

So how should L&D leaders respond? Start by shifting the question from “What does this role require now?” to “What will this role likely become?” Then, work backward. What experiences, knowledge, and capabilities must be built today to support success tomorrow?

Effective teams are:

• Building dynamic role profiles that adapt as new technologies and business models emerge
• Integrating AI into workforce planning tools to simulate different futures and surface new opportunities
• Redesigning development programs to account for lateral moves, hybrid roles, and new leadership expectations
• Supporting leaders through transitions, helping them redefine their contributions as machines take over more routine tasks

This is not about predicting the future perfectly. It is about being prepared for many possible futures and helping people adapt and thrive in any of them.

The Bottom Line

Static job descriptions are a thing of the past. The future requires leaders who recognize that human and digital roles will be frequently reimagined. To lead in this world, people must be trained not just to perform but to pivot.

The role of L&D is no longer to close skills gaps. It is to help organizations anticipate them. And to do that, L&D leaders must be fast, fluid, and relentlessly future-focused.

Now is the time to rethink not just what we teach but why we teach it and whether it’s what’s needed to prepare people for what lies ahead in the world of work.

Explore further insights by downloading our 2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused.

Research Report

2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused

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1. Bousquette, Isabelle, “Why Moderna Merged Its Tech and HR Departments,” CIO Journal, May 12, 2025. https://www.wsj.com/articles/why-moderna-merged-its-tech-and-hr-departments-95318c2a?utm. ︎

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2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused

In 2025, Harvard Business Impact conducted a comprehensive global study to survey more than 1,100 leadership development professionals, examining how their work fits into the jobs to be done for organizations today.

The post 2025 Global Leadership Development Study: Fast, Fluid, and Future-Focused appeared first on Harvard Business Impact.

The Future Is Fluent: Why AI Demands a New Kind of Leader

Leadership roles are shifting to align more closely with the demands of AI initiatives.
Organizations that foster an AI-ready culture through leadership will see faster, more sustainable transformation.

Explore the full infographic to uncover more insights.

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3 Strategies to Meet the Moment: Building the Collective Intelligence of Humans and Machines

AI-driven change is making learning more vital than ever. Predicting what will need to be learned and by whom is urgent.

In our 2025 Global Leadership Development Study, responses from 1,159 learning professionals and functional heads across 14 countries revealed three key strategies learning and development is using to meet the moment.

View the full infographic to learn the strategies for building the collective intelligence of humans and machines.

View the infographic

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