AI and the Future of Leadership

EY - Future of Work Event Amsterdam

Recently I joined the "What Can't Be Replaced by AI" event at EY's Amsterdam office. Hosted by Maarten Lintsen, with sharp insights from Anna van den Breemer-Kleene, Isabel Moll-Kranenburg, and Rina Joosten-Rabou.

I went because I'm fascinated. Sometimes a bit scared too, honestly. The pace at which this field is moving is dizzying. And as a leadership coach, I can't ignore the question of what this means for managers, for work, and for meaning.

Here's what I took away.

1. The meta-view

A theme that came up in the panel, and in a side conversation with Marielle Willemse: leaders need the capacity to zoom out. Stay away from AI tunnel vision. Look at your strategic goals, and find creative ways to make AI work for you.

Take recruitment. If efficiency is the only aim, you automate CV screening. But CVs predict roughly 3 percent of actual job success. Faster, not smarter.

The better question: how does AI help you find people who can transform and innovate your organization? Use AI to assess skills and potential. Not to count how many times someone wrote "stakeholder management" in their CV.

2. Leadership and adaptation

Only leaders who adapt fast enough will remain relevant. That requires AI literacy. Not learning to code, but understanding how to deploy the technology strategically.

And it's your job as a leader to make experimenting safe. If your team is afraid to try things, adoption stalls across your organization. Where there's fear, nothing happens.

3. From knowing to interpreting

Knowledge is rapidly losing its value at the individual level. AI gives us access to collective intelligence. Value moves from knowing to interpreting. And to asking the right questions.

Meanwhile, productivity growth in Europe is stalling. How do you use AI and agents to turn that around? Not a rhetorical question. A concrete challenge for every manager.

4. Culture and data-driven choices

Culture is how we create meaning together at work. It often feels intangible. AI can make it concrete. What is your culture today? Which behaviors fit where you want to go? How do you monitor progress?

Less guessing, more knowing.

5. Empathy and perception

The common idea is that AI can't show empathy. Yet a study showed that patients rated AI doctors as more empathetic than human ones.

Fair point: an AI has unlimited time, a doctor is under pressure. But it does make you think about your own human interactions. How often does someone at work get your full attention? Really? Or do you sneak a glance at your phone in between.

6. The value of human connection

Within a few years most of us will have a personal AI agent. It plans your meetings, analyzes data, executes tasks. My prediction: in writing, voice, and video they'll be nearly indistinguishable from humans.

So what's left that's uniquely human? In my view, primarily physical encounter. A real conversation. A coffee together. Looking someone in the eye and sensing what's going on under the surface.

That sounds simple. But it's exactly what many managers already skip. Too busy, too many meetings, firing off a quick message instead of walking over. Once everyone has an AI that fires off messages more efficiently than you, all that remains as your real added value is your personal contact.

7. Meaning beyond productivity

When AI and robots do tasks faster and cheaper than humans, we'll need new sources of meaning. Sources that don't depend on productivity alone.

This isn't new. Philosophers have wrestled for centuries with the question of what gives our lives meaning. The difference: AI forces us to take that question seriously, finally. No longer a philosophical luxury for the weekend. A core question for your career and your team.

Keep developing the qualities that make us human. Creativity. Curiosity. Empathy. Connection. Courage.

8. 2030 and beyond

The impact of AI in the coming decade will be faster and bigger than most of us realize. I'm probably underestimating it too.

The question isn't whether AI replaces us. The question is whether we keep evolving fast enough to stay meaningfully human alongside it.

9. Fewer people, more responsibility

My take: companies will hire fewer people in the years ahead. One person who can direct AI agents well achieves more than an entire team without AI. That holds for marketing, for development, for analysis, for finance.

What does this mean for managers? Also fewer. Smaller teams, flatter organizations. But more responsibility per person. And probably better paid, because the impact of that one person becomes much larger.

There's a flip side. Anyone who doesn't keep up with this development falls outside the circle. The middle ground that can still hide behind a team today won't have a place tomorrow.

For those who want to remain, this means: keep investing in yourself. In your communication. In your ability to bring people along through change. In your technological literacy. And in the human qualities AI can't reach: judgment, connection, courage.

Anyone thinking "I'll just wait and see" is losing the race before it's started.

What this means for you as a leader

Here's the core for me. AI raises the bar on what you need to bring as a leader. AI takes over the tactical work. What remains is exactly what good coaching and development build.

Real listening. Seeing beneath the surface of a conversation. Having difficult conversations without backing away. A vision that moves people. A team where people feel safe to experiment, including with AI.

These are no longer soft skills. This is your craft.

Want your managers to be ready for the years ahead? AI adoption is woven into the leadership programs I design and deliver. And it comes up in the 1-on-1 leadership coaching I offer to ambitious early-career managers. Schedule a free introduction call via the contact form. I'd love to tell you more.

Preparing Leaders for AI: The Skills That Actually Matter

Leadership & Executive Coach | David Buirs

The management skills AI can't replace. And why your leaders need to develop them now.

David Buirs is a Leadership and Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. In this article he examines what AI-driven automation means for new and developing managers: which skills are becoming obsolete, which are becoming critical, and why the bar for every leader is rising fast. Relevant for managers, HR professionals, and organisations considering leadership training for new managers.

Most leadership training programs teach the same things. Goal-setting. Progress tracking. Planning. Running structured meetings. Giving annual reviews.

These are solid skills. And AI is going to automate most of them.

Not completely. Not tomorrow. But the direction is clear, and it is moving faster than most organisations are ready for.

Over the past few years I have had dozens of conversations with senior leaders across industries. Directors, VPs, executives navigating this transition in real time. And a pattern keeps emerging. The technical side of management, the administrative backbone of the role, is becoming less and less what separates a good leader from a poor one.

What remains, and what increasingly cannot be delegated to a machine, is harder to teach. And far more valuable.

What Gallup has been saying for years

Before we get to AI, it is worth starting with a number that should already be unsettling.

Gallup studied 2.5 million teams and found that only one in ten managers naturally possesses the talent to lead well. The other 90 percent need deliberate development to succeed in the role. Gallup also estimates that closing this management gap could unlock close to ten trillion dollars in global productivity.

Ten trillion. And yet most organisations still promote their best individual contributor, hand them a new title, and leave them to figure it out.

The result is predictable. Teams disengage. Performance drops. Your best people leave. And HR is left managing the fallout of a problem that was preventable.

This has always been true. But AI is about to make it much more visible, much faster.

The skills that are becoming automated

In my conversations with senior leaders, there is growing consensus on which parts of management are most exposed to automation. Goal-setting frameworks. Progress dashboards. Meeting summaries. Scheduling and prioritisation. Performance data analysis. Compliance tracking. Even structured feedback templates.

These are things AI tools already do reasonably well, and will do better every year. They are also, coincidentally, the things most leadership training programs spend the majority of their time on.

That is a problem. Because if you are developing managers primarily around tasks that are being automated, you are training for yesterday.

The skills that are becoming more important

The leaders I speak with are consistently clear about what will matter more. Not instead of the basics. In addition to them. But with far greater weight.

Motivating people. Understanding what drives each individual on your team. Creating conditions where people want to do good work, not just perform for an audience.

Building real connection. Not team-building exercises. Genuine interest in the humans you work with. This is what creates psychological safety. And psychological safety is what makes people speak up, take risks, and grow.

Creating and communicating a vision. Where are we going, and why does it matter? Machines can generate roadmaps. Only a human can make people believe in one.

Judgment in complex situations. When the data is ambiguous, when the right answer is genuinely unclear, when values are in conflict. AI can offer options. It cannot own the decision.

Asking better questions. Coaching your team rather than solving their problems for them. Helping people think more clearly instead of just giving them answers. This is one of the highest-leverage things a leader can do, and one of the hardest to develop.

Coaching as a leadership style. Not as a one-off conversation, but as a way of operating. Building people's capacity over time. Making yourself less necessary, not more central.

Navigating conflict and difficult conversations. Not avoiding them. Not softening them into meaninglessness. Having them directly, with care, in a way that strengthens the relationship rather than damaging it.

Communication across ambiguity. Being clear when things are not clear. Keeping people grounded during uncertainty. This is increasingly what senior leaders say separates managers who retain their teams from those who lose them.

None of these are new. What is new is how much more weight they will carry in the years ahead.

The agent economy: fewer people, higher expectations

There is a second change coming that most organisations are not yet talking about openly.

Companies will likely have fewer employees. Not because the work disappears, but because individual employees will increasingly supervise autonomous programs doing parts of that work. AI agents handling research, reporting, drafting, analysis, customer interaction. The human in the loop becomes the decision-maker, the quality controller, the strategic director of that work.

Fewer people doing more. Each person carrying more responsibility. Each leader managing a team of humans plus a layer of automated processes.

This means fewer leadership positions overall. And significantly higher expectations for the ones that remain.

Up or out is coming for everyone

The Big 4 consulting firms have operated on an "up or out" model for decades. You develop, you grow, you take on more, or you leave. There is no comfortable plateau.

That model is starting to spread. The economics of AI-driven efficiency are pushing organisations toward leaner, more demanding structures. The comfortable middle is getting harder to hold.

What this means practically: the managers who are not actively developing their human skills, who are relying on technical expertise and hoping that is enough, will find their position increasingly difficult to sustain. Not in some abstract future. In the next few years.

This is not a threat. It is a description of a landscape that is already changing. And knowing the landscape is the first step to navigating it well.

What this means for leadership training now

The organisations that will come through this transition well are already treating leadership development as something more than a one-day training or an annual offboarding of information.

They are asking different questions. Not just "did the training go well?" But: did anything actually change? Are our managers coaching their teams differently? Are difficult conversations happening earlier? Is the culture around feedback improving?

This is why management training built on learning science, with real attention to transfer and behaviour change over time, produces different results than a standard programme. Not because the content is secret. Because the architecture is different.

And for individual managers navigating this landscape: leadership coaching gives you a dedicated space to develop precisely the skills that cannot be automated. Coaching skills, communication, judgment, self-awareness. The skills that will define your career over the next decade.

If your role sits at a more senior level and you are thinking about leadership impact at the directorial or executive level, executive coaching is a natural fit.

Start now, not when the pressure forces you to

The managers and leaders who will thrive are not necessarily the most talented. They are the ones who took their development seriously before the external pressure made it unavoidable.

Communication. Coaching. Judgment. Connection. These are not soft skills. They are the skills that will be hardest to replace, and hardest to develop quickly if you have not started.

The time to work on them is not when you are under pressure. It is now, while you have the space to build them deliberately.

If you are curious about what that could look like for you or your organisation, feel free to plan a free introduction. No obligation. Just a conversation.

Leadership Skills AI Cannot Replace

David Buirs | Leadership & Executive Coach

The Leadership Skills AI Will Have a Much Harder Time Replacing

Leadership and executive coach David Buirs, based in Amsterdam, examines which human leadership skills remain hardest for AI to replicate as org structures flatten and management tasks become automated. This article draws on Self-Determination Theory and Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 research to make the case for connection, curiosity, focused presence, and coaching as the capabilities that will define effective leadership in the years ahead.

The org chart is getting flatter. Here’s why.

A marketing director used to need a team. Someone to run the campaigns. Someone to write the copy. Someone to pull the reports. Someone to manage the tools. Now that same director can work with five AI agents running in parallel. One monitors ad performance and adjusts bids automatically. One drafts content variations for testing. One pulls weekly analytics and flags what needs attention. One manages the posting schedule.

One person. Five autonomous processes. The output of a team.

That’s happening across functions, across industries. Companies need fewer people to get the same work done. The pyramid shrinks.

That changes what leadership actually means.

When AI can measure progress, flag underperformance, schedule 1-on-1s, and generate a status report in seconds, what’s left for a manager to do? Quite a lot, as it turns out. But the nature of the work changes completely.

What remains is almost entirely human.

Connection drives motivation more than most leaders realise.

There’s a well-researched framework in psychology called Self-Determination Theory. It identifies three core drivers of intrinsic motivation: autonomy, competence, and relatedness. That last one matters more than most leaders realise.

Relatedness means feeling genuinely connected to the people around you. To your team. To whoever leads you.

Research consistently shows that people who feel a real connection with their manager are more motivated, more committed, and more willing to go beyond what’s strictly required. People work hard for someone they respect and feel seen by.

An AI can schedule your check-in. Making you feel like someone actually cares about your development is a different thing entirely. That will keep mattering, even as the tools get smarter.

Curiosity means something different when it comes from a person.

A good leader notices things. They pick up on a team member’s tone in a meeting. They sense something is off before anyone says it out loud. That kind of attention comes from genuine interest in people, and it produces questions that land differently.

AI generates questions from patterns in data. That’s useful. But a team member can tell the difference between being genuinely wondered about and being processed. One opens things up. The other closes them down.

Leaders who bring real curiosity to their teams create something no dashboard can: a culture where people feel worth understanding. That’s a harder thing to replace than any technical skill.

We’ve become terrible at focus.

Here’s something that rarely shows up in leadership development programs: the ability to simply be present with someone.

Notifications have made sustained attention rare. Most managers are half-listening in most conversations. They’re physically there, mentally elsewhere. People feel that. It erodes connection faster than almost anything else.

One practice I suggest to the leaders I work with: sit for ten minutes a day doing absolutely nothing. No phone, no podcast, no task. Just sit. It sounds trivial. It trains something the attention economy has been systematically dismantling.

A leader who can genuinely focus on a person, for a full conversation, without drifting, is increasingly unusual. And increasingly valuable.

Coaching is becoming the core job of a leader.

Tracking whether goals are on target, flagging missed deadlines, organising feedback cycles. AI is already doing a lot of this, and will do more. The administrative layer of management is shrinking.

Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2025 report, which surveyed nearly a quarter of a million workers across 160 countries, points to three actions organisations can take to reverse the engagement crisis. Coaching is the second. Managers trained in coaching practices saw performance improvements of 20 to 28%, and their teams reported up to 18% higher engagement. You can read the full report on the Gallup website.

What AI cannot yet do is sit across from someone who’s struggling and help them figure out what’s actually going on. Ask the right question at the right moment. Hold space for the answer without filling the silence too quickly.

That’s coaching. And it’s becoming the job, not a nice extra.

As a certified executive coach, I work with senior leaders who want to develop exactly this: a coaching style of leadership that builds trust, draws out ownership, and makes the people around them better. It’s a learnable skill. It takes practice and the right conditions to develop it. Leaders who invest in it now are ahead of a curve that’s moving fast.

This is about the long game.

Some of what feels uniquely human today will look different in five years. Language models are getting better at simulating empathy, curiosity, connection.

But genuine human connection, real curiosity, focused presence, and the ability to coach someone through a hard moment. These will be the last things to go, if they go at all. Building them now makes you a better leader regardless of what the technology does next.

The pyramid is smaller. The people still in it need to be genuinely good at the things machines aren’t, at least not yet.

If you’re an individual leader looking to develop these skills, management coaching or coaching for executives is a logical place to start. For organisations that want to build a coaching culture across their management layer, leadership training is worth a conversation. Plan a free introduction here. Zero obligation.