What Will You Do in the Age of AI? Taking Back Agency
Most AI conversations get stuck on what AI will do. The harder and more useful question is what you will do. This is the angle I explored at an IMD Alumni Club evening in Vienna.
What will you do in the age of AI?
Last night in Vienna, I spoke at the IMD Alumni Club of Austria & CEE on Leadership in the AI Age.
A new kind of intelligence is taking shape around us. Bit by bit, things that used to be fiction are becoming possible. And in that shift, human agency matters more than ever.
The question I wanted to explore together wasn't "what will AI do?" It was: what will you do?
At one point in the evening, everyone pulled out their phones and asked their AI tool to name one significant mistake from the past year. Not operational mistakes. How they thought. How they decided. Or didn't.
The answers were honest and familiar. Getting too complex instead of acting. Waiting a little too long. Thinking more when moving forward was what the moment needed.
It was about taking back agency.
Not what AI can do. What you can do.
Thank you Norbert Hölzl for inviting me and thanks to all the participants for the very lively discussion.
What is one thing only you can do in your role that AI cannot?
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How to take back agency in the AI era
The senior leaders I work with on AI all face the same temptation at some point: to treat AI as something happening TO them rather than something they have a stake in. The temptation makes sense. The pace is fast, the changes are confusing, and the experts disagree. But waiting to be told what to do is not a strategy. It is an abdication.
→ Decide where you reskill. AI will not pick your learning curve for you.
→ Decide where you experiment. The leaders learning fastest are the ones who play with AI tools deliberately on real work, not the ones who wait for the perfect training programme.
→ Decide where you keep humans in the loop. AI cannot decide what values your team operates by. That is your job.
Across the senior leaders I coach, the ones gaining ground in the AI era share one habit. They reflect deliberately on how they think and decide. They do not let AI become the lazy default for thinking they should still be doing themselves.
This is the kind of work that benefits from structured reflection. Not because reflection is therapeutic, but because it forces you to make the implicit explicit. What am I actually deciding here? What did I outsource that I should have kept? What did I keep that I could have outsourced?
If you want to start that practice today, my free AI Coach Tünde Light is a set of AI-powered reflective questions and prompts I built to help senior leaders challenge their own thinking and get unstuck on real situations. Leave your email here to download it: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources
Working with senior leaders on agency and decision-making in the AI age is what I do every day. Learn more about my executive coaching here.
https://www.thechangerepublic.com/executivecoaching