Have you read the headlines doing the rounds these days? "AI will transform leadership." "The leadership skills of tomorrow." "Why leaders must reinvent themselves for the AI era." I read a lot of these, and I have started asking a simple question: is this actually true, or is it just a catchy sentence?
It is worth pausing on that question, because the answer changes what we should actually be preparing future leaders for.
I have been at work for the past 30 years or so, and have seen this several times. The earliest I can remember is when the internet blew up and we saw globalisation of the Indian economy and workplace. Then again, with the coming of social media and networks. And now again with AI. And some elements of leadership did change over these periods, but many remained the same. And it might be useful to look at both! But before that, let’s take a look at how AI has already made inroads in how we are developing our leaders.
What’s happening in India right now?
Two things are happening in parallel in India right now concerning AI and the workforce.
The first is in education. CBSE has made Computational Thinking and AI compulsory from Class 3 under NEP 2020, rolling out from 2026-27, building on AI as a skill subject in Classes 9 to 12 and now well-established undergraduate AI degrees at IITs, IIITs, and major private universities. There is a live debate about whether this is arriving too early, given how many Class 5 students still cannot read at a Class 2 level. But the direction is clear: a generation of Indian children will grow up with AI as ordinary, not exotic.
The second is in the workplace. Indian companies are past quiet experimentation. IT majors like Wipro, TCS, and Infosys are retraining hundreds of thousands of employees and redeploying capacity freed by automation. Homegrown players like Sarvam AI and Krutrim are building sovereign foundation models. Enterprises are deploying WhatsApp AI agents for customer engagement, shifting from copilots to autonomous "agentic AI," and using computer vision for factory quality control. By several measures, India is adopting AI faster than many Western markets.
So the pressure is real. The question is what that pressure is actually doing to leadership.
The Claim I Want to Push Back On
Somewhere in the last two years, a narrative took hold that leadership itself is being rewritten by AI, that a new species of "AI era leader" is emerging with a new set of skills. I want to be honest about where I think that claim comes from, because some of it is marketing and some of it is real.
Part of it comes from consultancies with a commercial interest in telling you that everything has changed and that they can help you change with it. Part of it is a genuine shift in what a leader's day looks like. And part of it is a bit of a sleight of hand: the fact that leaders now use different tools gets quietly presented as proof that leadership itself has changed.
Here is what I believe - AI is not creating new leadership skills. It is stripping away the parts of the job that were never really leadership to begin with, the information gathering, the first draft analysis, the number crunching, the busywork that surrounded the real decision. What is left, once you take that away, is a much smaller and much more concentrated core.
What Is Actually Changing
The content of a leader's day is changing. Less time is spent preparing information, and more time is spent interpreting AI generated options and deciding among them. The pace and volume of decisions leaders are expected to make is increasing, because the old bottleneck of someone having to build the analysis first, is shrinking rapidly. Team shapes are changing too, with AI augmented individual contributors doing work that used to require larger teams, which means leaders are managing differently structured groups than they were five years ago. In fact, in some industries, it is said, team leads are managing AI agents who have assigned roles, decision rights and responsibilities like their human counterparts.
Instead of a sales manager manually pulling numbers from spreadsheets every week to guess which deals will close this quarter, AI now sits inside the CRM and does this continuously in the background. Tracking how long a deal has sat in a stage compared to the average, whether email response times have slowed, whether the buyer has gone quiet on calls, and so on.
None of this is trivial. It is a real shift in the texture of the job. But notice what category all of it falls into. It is process. It is throughput. It is the mechanics of how information moves through an organisation. It is not the part of leadership that determines whether people trust you, follow you, or grow under you.
What Is Not Changing, No Matter What the Headlines Say
Judgment –
AI may be extraordinary at pattern matching against everything it has seen before. But real judgment calls, the ones taken where stakes are high, time is short and data is thin or unreliable,still rest on a human being who is accountable for the outcome. That was true before AI and it remains true now. If anything, as AI absorbs the well precedented decisions, the decisions left for humans are disproportionately the hard, ambiguous ones. The demand for solid judgment is going up, not down.
Trust –
Think of a plant head who quietly tells the CEO that a supplier delay will blow up the promised timeline, weeks before the official status report would have flagged it, simply because years of straight dealing with that supplier gave them a sense trouble is brewing. And the CEO believes them and takes a call accordingly. No system prompted that disclosure. It came from a relationship where honesty had been rewarded rather than punished, which is precisely the kind of trust AI cannot replicate.
Reading a room -
An effective leader is able to walk into a room and sense the mood, and manage the siuation accordingly. Sensing tension before anyone names it, adjusting your message mid meeting because you feel the team is anxious rather than confused, knowing when to push and when to hold back. This requires subtle senses, relying on past experience and trusting your gut. This remains a deeply human, moment to moment skill.
Taking Risks –
Backing a team member everyone else has written off. Launching before the data is conclusive. Believing in something enough to be wrong in public. AI optimises around precedent. Leadership, at its best, sometimes means moving before precedent exists. Leadership means creating the precedent that AI follows.
Taking Ownership –
No matter how much of the analysis behind a decision was AI assisted, someone has to stand in front of the board, the team, or the market and say, this was my call. That accountability cannot be delegated to a tool. It is arguably the most non negotiable part of the job, and it always has been.
Why This Matters More for Women in Leadership, Not Less
Here is the part I think matters most for the work I do, though I want to hold it carefully rather than as a simple silver lining, because the research pulls both ways.
For a long time, women in leadership have been told, subtly and not so subtly, that their value lies in being the most prepared person in the room, and this is not just perception. Research on evaluation bias has found that competence alone often establishes a man as credible, while women are judged simultaneously on competence, likeability, and conduct, a heavier bar to clear. Nearly half of women in a large public survey say they are held to higher standards and must do more to prove themselves, compared with roughly a quarter of men who see it that way. Thoroughness has not been a preference for many women leaders. It has been the entry fee.
AI is coming for exactly that kind of work, quickly. The overnight deck, the exhaustive analysis, the meeting notes, much of what has functioned as visible proof of competence is precisely the structured cognitive work AI now handles well, the same way it now qualifies sales leads or drafts a forecast overnight. IMF research has found women face greater AI exposure than men overall, partly because a larger share of the work women have historically carried sits in AI's current strike zone.
But judgment and courage are not evaluated neutrally either. Research on how success is received shows women displaying the same assertive, risk taking behaviour that earns men credit are often liked less and marked down for it. In multi country executive reviews, women rate equal to or better than men on nearly every measure except one, vision and strategy, the very trait this article calls AI proof. The bias that once pushed women toward over preparation may simply relocate.
There is a hopeful counterpoint too. During the pandemic, with no time to over prepare, 360 reviews found women rated as more effective crisis leaders than men, closer to the CFO who flags an uncomfortable truth early, or the plant head whose honesty was safe because of years of trust. When judgment was tested for real, it was seen and rewarded.
So the opening is real, but not automatic. It has to be claimed, through visibility and deliberate bias correction, or the old bias simply finds a new target.
Where This Leaves Us
So back to the original question. Why is there an assumption that leadership skills will change in the age of AI? Partly because it makes a good headline, and partly because something real is shifting in how leaders spend their time. But the deeper and more honest claim is this: AI is not changing what leadership is. It is changing the ratio of a leader's day spent on process versus judgment, and in doing so, it is making the judgment, trust, and accountability side of the job more visible and more consequential than it has been in years. Every leader needs to embrace AI as part of their roles, just as I have leveraged AI in writing this article. But they need to go beyond what AI can do and not lose their core human capabilities which no AI can compete with.
About the Author
Aparna Devagiri brings over three decades of experience across the corporate sector and entrepreneurship, spanning roles as an HR professional, people manager, business owner, certified coach (ICF-PCC), and researcher. She now partners with leaders across Manufacturing, Technology, Banking, and Financial Services in India and abroad, as a coach, consultant, speaker, and workshop facilitator.
She is a sought-after speaker on topics relating to DEI and leadership. Aparna is the author of "The Professional Woman's Handbook: Navigating Choices for Success", a guide for women professionals navigating life and career.
Aparna's work centers on advancing Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion, with a strong focus on women professionals. She also serves as Vice Chairperson of CII Indian Women Network Karnataka.