Future of Leadership in the Age of AI

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is reality. The Fourth Industrial Revolution, or a Robot Apocalypse depending on whom you ask, is already underway. The transition has already started. But what it means in terms of leadership? How should leaders prepare for the dramatic shifts in the global workforce?

The authors, emerging technology risk researchers and practitioners, demystify the processes behind this revolution. Rather than offering another sensationalistic, panic-inducing view on AI – or its overly-optimistic alternative – the authors explain the reality of AI implementation in business environments.

The transformed economy will need a new kind of executives – motivators, innovators and social experimenters – those that have, paradoxically, developed their distinctly human skills. The Future of Leadership in the Age of AI clarifies those new roles and makes the transition easier.

Book Reviews

Luka Ivezic is an independent consultant and author exploring geopolitical and socioeconomic implications of emerging technologies such as Quantum Computing, 5G, Artificial Intelligence (AI) and Internet of Things (IoT).

He has been exploring these topics, studying and writing about them for the last decade. To better observe policy discussions and various societal attitudes and impacts of early implementations, he lives between US, UK, Denmark, Singapore, Japan and Canada. This has given him a unique perspective on how emerging technologies shape different societies, and how different cultures determine technological development.

While writing the book, we also created a series of cartoons imagining what daily office life might look like when humans and AI work side by side. The series, Working With AI, follows a cast of characters — Al the AI robot manager, his credulous creator Marin, the scheming Bo, the fiercely competitive Maya, the world-domination-plotting catbot Kiki, and others — as they navigate the absurdities of a workplace where policies designed for humans are applied equally to machines, and where neither side fully understands the other.

These cartoons were embedded throughout the book to lighten the more analytical chapters and to illustrate, through humor, many of the tensions we discussed seriously in the text: the gap between AI capability and human intuition, the organizational awkwardness of integrating AI into existing hierarchies, and the very human tendency to either fear or blindly trust our AI colleagues.

Nearly a decade later, with AI now actually embedded in knowledge work, the cartoons have aged surprisingly well — not because we predicted the technology accurately, but because the human dynamics they satirize remain exactly the same. You can browse the full collection at workingwith.ai.