Leadership Wisdom of the Week #26

“AI systems can optimise, but they can’t decide what’s worth optimising for. That remains a human responsibility.”

– Doz & Dutta, 2026

Most of the Leadership Wisdoms I have written about have come from classic texts. This week’s quote is different: it discusses one of the most topical leadership challenges of this decade – how to lead in the age of AI.

Doz and Dutta’s quote captures something essential about how leaders should view AI. On the one hand, it is a tool that may help leaders work more effectively; on the other, it is a powerful system whose work needs to be directed, bounded and evaluated.

AI can be very quick and effective in carrying out a task it has been given. AI-enabled systems can also be designed to learn from feedback and improve their performance over time, thus enabling huge improvements in efficiency in certain tasks. AI is great at summarising large amounts of data and identifying patterns. It can propose different viewpoints, point out potential risks and help prepare communications for different audiences and even challenging situations. Overall, it can act as a valuable sparring partner for any leader’s thinking.

However, if you as a leader want to get the best out of AI, you need to know what you are aiming for. You need to make decisions about what is desirable and what is not. You need to have a clear understanding of the organisation’s purpose – its why and how – in your mind. You need to be able to select and deselect; to describe clearly not only what you want AI to optimise, but also what must not be sacrificed in pursuit of greater efficiency.

In a way, this is actually quite similar to the effective strategic leadership of people. Even with people, the best way to get an organisation moving in the same direction is to have a clear purpose and clarity about organisational values. The clearer these are, the more you can delegate and allow people to make everyday decisions in line with this shared understanding.

However, there is a major difference between AI and people. People can interpret the organisation’s purpose, recognise when a goal conflicts with its values and question what they have been asked to do. AI cannot be expected to exercise that judgement or take that responsibility. Whereas with people, the best leaders know how to create a shared direction and then delegate, with AI, you need to build very clear guardrails and provide instructions about the expected behaviour. With people, you need to remember to give them space; with AI, you need to remember to be very precise in your instructions.

Considering that many of us are, or will be, leading units consisting of both human beings and AI-enabled processes, one of our main challenges is not simply to make the best possible use of AI. It is to lead people and govern technology so that both serve the same purpose.

https://knowledge.insead.edu/strategy/building-winning-intelligence-designing-strategic-advantage