Will AI Replace Your Job as a Leader? It Depends How You Define the Job.
The question of whether AI will replace leadership work depends entirely on how leaders define their own work. Treat it as a list of tasks and AI will absorb most of it within a few years.
"People think a comedian's job is jokes. It is not. It is joy."
Professor Murat Tarakci of IMD opened his leadership workshop with that line from Jimmy Carr.
His point was simple. Will AI replace your job as a leader? It depends entirely on how you define the job.
Recently I stood on the same stage as a speaker in the "AI Impact On..." series. This month I sat in the audience. And once again, I learned more sitting down than standing up.
If leadership is a list of tasks, reporting, reviewing, approving, communicating, then yes, AI is coming for most of it.
But Professor Tarakci reframes it differently:
"My job as a leader is not to keep the right answers. It is to ask the right questions."
"My job is not to sell AI. It is to orchestrate relationships."
That doesn't sound like a list of tasks. It sounds like a human holding something a machine cannot.
Thank you to Professor Murat Tarakci, Rafael Martín de Agar and the IMD Alumni Club Zürich for another sharp evening.
What does your job become once you rewire it?
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What stays uniquely human in leadership work
The task-list view of leadership has been quietly dying for years. AI has just accelerated the timeline. The leaders who will thrive in the next decade are the ones who actively rewire how they describe their own job.
→ Stop describing your work as "reporting, reviewing, approving, communicating." AI will absorb most of that, and you will sound like a list of automatable tasks.
→ Start describing your work as "asking the questions that change what the team thinks, holding the tension between competing options, and shaping the relationships that make decisions possible." That is harder for AI to do, and easier for senior leadership to recognise as the work that creates value.
→ Use AI as a thinking partner for the analytical layer of your work, not a replacement for your judgement on the human layer.
This reframe has practical implications. In coaching senior leaders, I see the ones with the strongest position in the AI era are the ones who can articulate clearly what they uniquely bring to the room beyond information processing. The ones with the weakest position are the ones who still describe their value in tasks AI is rapidly absorbing.
The work of defining your own leadership in the AI era is not abstract. It changes what your team sees you doing, what your sponsors say about you, and what role you are seen as fit for in the next reorganisation.
If you want to start somewhere concrete, my free AI Tools & Tips Guide shows the AI tools I actually use as a coach and leader, with workflows that save time and clarify thinking without replacing your judgement. Leave your email here to download it: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources
Working with senior leaders on questions like this is what I do every day. Learn more about my executive coaching here.
https://www.thechangerepublic.com/executivecoaching