It’s no secret that we are currently in a technology-led revolution. Artificial intelligence is elevating the way we live and work at a speed that is rarely seen (if all history), while businesses and leaders around the world are scrambling to keep up. This rate of change has been the most obvious in the past few years, when Openai’s Chatgpt platform was released in November 2022, pushing the generated AI and the seismic power of AI more widely toward public awareness. After this gradual change, the mainstream adoption of AI exploded, and Chatgpt alone attracted More than 300 million users per week. The generated AI systems have seriously affected the global business landscape, triggering companies to increase investment in AI and reevaluate the work roles of the industry and functions.
But what if I told you that the generated AI tools are just the tip of the AI iceberg? Imagine AI not only generates content or analyzes data, but actually runs business processes from the end to the end. Autonomy. Wisely. And large-scale. This technology, proxy AI, is not a concept of the future or a new buzzword, and is here now. Let's take a closer look at why and how we can see proxy AI tools disrupt decisions for companies and how leaders work in an overall way.
Agent AI is reshaping team workflows and leadership
Although traditional AI can process large amounts of data to make predictions and assist decisions, its core is the tools that traditionally rely on humans to initiate the process. Agent AI systems are not passive tools; they are becoming active agents who can initiate actions, make autonomous decisions and adjust strategies dynamically, with little human investment besides the initial guide setting.
To illustrate this through real-world business scenarios, before Alber, internal marketing teams might have spent 10-15 hours a week performing the same repetitive tasks such as collecting product updates, writing campaign content, and scheduling social posts. The role of a leader is to delegate, sign up for work and manage the performance of the team that performs these tasks. Agentic AI can perform all of this work independently, reducing the team’s manpower workload to 15 minutes to review outputs and approve the next round, unleashing the team and most famous leadership to focus on creative thinking, strategy and growth.
Solutions like this show the incredible potential of proxy AI to significantly increase speed and productivity while reducing the cost and time of repetitive tasks. Soon, the team structure will develop into a combination of human and non-human resources, including AI-driven agents, and even fully autonomous, AI-based digital human employees who accumulate experiences to learn and meet the needs of customers and stakeholders through experiential learning.
With the composition of the workforce, significant changes in traditional hierarchical leadership models, which are based on linear, top-down decision-making flows that simply cannot maintain pace. In the future, driven by the hybrid human AI workforce, the leadership team must expand its management style to effectively lead the hybrid team. This means combining more traditional human-oriented leadership with AI literacy skills, such as communicating effectively with AI systems, guiding their teams to work with AI more effectively, and developing the critical thinking necessary to evaluate AI output, and identifying any potential bias and inaccuracy.
The power within the organization is shifting
The continued growth of AI-driven agents will mean promoting a broad shift for those who can truly understand, manage and leverage AI output into leadership positions. For example, as the world of work continues to master with AI, many Leadership “blind spots” may arise, where leaders misunderstand AI’s capabilities and see it as another tool rather than recognizing the strategic autonomy that AI can achieve, resulting in missed growth opportunities or serious failures. The need to truly recognize and leverage AI (becoming even more important due to the rise of more complex proxy AI tools) will mean that more and more leaders come from AI-driven backgrounds such as technicians, data scientists and AI ethicists, rather than people from more “traditional” leadership backgrounds that are focused on climbing companies. In particular, if AI remains truly human-first, a new era of leadership must prioritize ethical and security issues when applying AI-based systems in a business environment, which will further bring leaders from the AI-AdjaceSt background.
Without rethinking the leadership structure, organizations using AI face significant challenges related to interpretability, bias, and governance failures that ultimately affect competitiveness and put companies at risk of undermining legal proceedings, sanctions and loss of public trust. When a selected governance and regulatory framework is about to take effect, e.g. EU Artificial Intelligence LawAI is currently developing much faster than we have effectively regulated it, which emphasizes the need for leadership teams that fully understand the impact of AI business and can make appropriate decisions accordingly. Leaders who can truly grasp the various risks and impacts of AI applications, and how best to apply the principles of accountability, transparency and human supervision will mean the difference between success and failure.
New leadership is essential
Although proxy AI matches developments that are even beyond human capacity at an incredible rate in a growing field, it cannot replicate human emotional intelligence, empathy, or context-driven strategic acumen. Specifically, some examples of situations where proxy AI should not be relied on include:
- Situations that require emotional intelligence, creativity, or strategic ambiguity.
- Complex legal, ethical or highly customized scenarios.
- Any task that requires a deep background or relationship building.
In view of this, while AI (supervisor or otherwise) effectively replaces human leaders, the role of leaders must be modernized to remain relevant in the ever-changing world of work. In short, we must redesign the leadership of the future as agents, boards and executives proactively reimagine existing organizational models, embedding hybrid human-machine machine leadership to remain relevant in an increasingly AI-driven world. To ensure AI is effective for us rather than harming us, core leadership in the future must also include a strategic understanding of AI, interdisciplinary governance, ethical vision, and collaborative decision-making in humans and machine agents.
There is no doubt that leaders’ role in the irrevocable AI-LED economy will irrevocably shift, focusing more on building relationships, creativity and leadership goals that enhance leadership and broader team capabilities as powerful AI tools grow, will empower truly effective future leaders to focus on the best work they do: strategy, innovation and connection.
Kamales Lardi is the author of commercial artificial intelligence and a recognized global keynote speaker
