How Leaders Use AI (And Where It Goes Wrong)

David Buirs - Leadership- & Executive Coach

How Leaders Use AI (And Where It Gets in the Way)

David Buirs is a leadership coach in Amsterdam. This post shows how leaders use AI for planning, engagement data, conversation prep, and goal setting, and where AI gets in the way of a leader's personal work. You learn which tasks you can safely hand off and which ones you keep for yourself.

The question is no longer whether you use AI as a leader. Almost everyone already does. The question is what for.

That is where the real difference shows up. Some things get better when you bring AI in. Other things get hollowed out. And which is which shapes how your people see you. That image feeds straight back into how effective you can be.

Here is how I look at it with the leaders who come to me. AI takes over the technical and analytical work. That gives you time for the part of leadership only you can do. Being present. Asking the right question. Making real contact. How leaders use AI decides whether that room opens up or disappears.

Start With the Planning

Plenty of operational leaders drown in rosters and capacity questions. How many people do you need, and when? How busy will next month be? How much margin do you build in for illness or overrun?

This is exactly the kind of work AI is strong at. Feed it your historical numbers and let it look for patterns. Which weeks always peak? Where are you structurally short? You get a first analysis in minutes that used to cost you an afternoon.

The output is a proposal, not a decision. You know the people behind the numbers. You know one team member just came back from leave and needs to ease in. You add that context yourself. AI calculates, you weigh.

Read What Your Engagement Data Tells You

Most managers look at an engagement survey and see a grade. A 7.2. Slightly higher than last year. On to the next agenda item.

There is far more in there. Drop the anonymized results from the past few years into an AI tool and ask for trends. Where does the score drop consistently? Which themes keep coming back in the open answers? When did the decline start?

Then ask yourself the uncomfortable question. What does this data say about me as a leader? According to Gallup, only around ten percent of working people feel genuinely engaged at work. Your team is part of that figure. The numbers often show months in advance that someone is checking out, well before the resignation letter lands on your desk.

You do not have to fish those signals out of a spreadsheet yourself. That is what this tool is for.

Let an Agent Prepare Your Conversations

Here it gets more interesting than a tool that summarizes something. You can have an AI agent gather the loose signals before every one-on-one. What has happened since last time? Which agreements were still open? Which themes kept coming up in earlier conversations?

The clever part is the autonomy. A good agent pulls from different sources on its own, cross-references your calendar, and hands you a short briefing. You can set it to run every morning without asking. The briefing is simply there before your conversation starts.

You can also connect an agent like this to your email. Ask for an overview of every message you have not replied to yet, and the messages where you are still waiting on a reply. Have them ranked by urgency. Then let the agent add the open points straight to the agenda of your one-on-one with the right person. That way every loose thread comes back at the moment you are speaking to that person anyway.

And notice what you win that time for. You waste no minutes at the start of the conversation. You do not have to search for where you left off. You walk in prepared and give your full attention to the person across from you. The agent does the digging beforehand so you can put your phone away during the conversation itself.

One warning. An agent that digs through your systems touches your people's personal data. So know exactly which tool does that, and whether it happens safely and within the rules. More on that below.

Help Yourself Set Goals

As a leader you have two kinds of conversations about goals with your people.

In the first kind, you set the direction. "I expect ten percent more revenue this year. Projects X and Y are done by the end of Q3." Clear expectations, clear boundaries.

In the second kind, you flip it around. Here your people come with development goals that matter to them. What do they want to learn? Where do they want to be in two years? You have that conversation together, and it comes from them. A classic coaching conversation.

For the first kind, AI can help you. Let it think along on a sharp wording of a goal. Ask for the blind spots in your reasoning. Check whether your expectation is concrete and realistic. In the second kind, your employee holds the wheel. Let them reach for AI themselves to sharpen their ideas. As long as the goal comes from them and they keep the lead, you strengthen their ownership of that development.

Guard the Line on Personal Data

Here it gets serious. The moment you type a team member's name into an AI tool, you enter personal data. Under the GDPR you are responsible for that. Recent research shows that nearly thirty-five percent of what people paste into these tools contains sensitive information. Much of it without the user noticing.

The solution is simple. Anonymize before you enter anything. Talk about "team member A" instead of a name. Say "an employee with a dip in their numbers" instead of details that point to one person. The analysis stays useful. The person stays protected.

Make a habit of this. It belongs to how you treat your people.

The Email You Are Better Off Writing Yourself

And then the part where AI can truly get in the way of your leadership.

Imagine receiving this from your manager, after a hard week:

"Dear team member, I just wanted to take a moment. Not just any email — but a heartfelt moment of appreciation. Your dedication over the past period wasn't merely impressive; it was nothing short of transformative. In a world that's constantly changing, you are the one who makes the difference. Your contribution isn't just work. It's a journey. Together we build synergy and empower one another to elevate our shared objectives to the next level. Keep shining! Warmest possible regards."

You feel right away what is wrong. Nobody talks like that. It is smooth, correct, and completely empty. No human wrote this.

Research from the University of Florida among more than a thousand professionals confirms the feeling. When people notice that a personal message was heavily AI-generated, the share who see their manager as sincere drops from eighty-three percent to somewhere between forty and fifty-two percent. That same email costs you trust, integrity, and authority.

Reading an AI email feels impersonal. A bit like putting your phone face-up on the table during a one-on-one with your direct report. Both pull the connection away at the moment it matters most.

So write your personal messages yourself. Or if you use AI for a first draft, read it back critically. Does this sound like you? Would you say it out loud this way? If not, rewrite it until it does. A grammar check is fine. Having a machine put your appreciation into words does not belong there.

The pattern under all these examples is the same. Use AI for the calculation, the analysis, the first draft. Keep the human work with yourself. The more time you win on the technical part, the more room you have for the part that makes you a leader.

That is also exactly what makes your role future-proof. As AI takes over more technical tasks, the value of a leader moves toward the human. Being present. Having difficult conversations. Asking the right question at the right moment. None of that can be automated.

If you want to get sharper at this, that is exactly what leadership guidance focuses on. For leaders at director level, executive coaching is a logical deepening. And for organizations that want to train their managers in this structurally, a leadership program is a next step.

Running into this yourself and want to talk it through? Plan a free introduction here. We look together at where you stand and what helps you forward.

Will AI Replace Managers? The Bad News. And the Good.

David Buirs - Leadership- & Executive Coach

Will AI Replace Managers? The Bad News. And the Good.

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This article looks at whether AI will replace managers, how automation shrinks teams and absorbs administrative management work, and which leadership skills keep you valuable. Readers learn where to focus their development for the years ahead.

I keep coming back to one image. A company that used to need ten people, now running on three. The work stayed. Most of it just gets handled by AI agents that decide, send the email, book the ticket, process the refund, upload the data. Nobody has to ask them.

Helping managers become great leaders is my work. It is the thing I love most. So this is a future I find uncomfortable. Still, I would rather look at it clearly than pretend it is not coming. The question I hear most often these days is simple. Will AI replace managers?

Here is what I see. The more repetitive a role is, the easier it becomes for an agent to do it faster and cheaper. Work that once took ten people can now be done by one person managing ten agents. And what counts as repetitive keeps moving. A year ago an agent could handle a simple, predictable task. Now it runs a whole process, with steps and judgment calls along the way. Every month the line moves further. Work we thought was too complex ends up inside it.

Companies Are Getting Smaller

This is happening across the board. Some sectors get hit harder than others, but the direction is the same everywhere. What took ten people might soon take three. Teams shrink and output climbs. When a company only needs three people, it really matters which three.

Two Things Happen to Management at Once

When companies get smaller, managers are impacted too. A smaller organisation needs fewer managers to run it. That alone thins out the management layer.

Then add a second effect on top. A lot of classic management work is administration in disguise. Tracking progress toward KPIs. Scheduling and planning. Forecasting. Pulling numbers into a report and passing them up the chain. This is the structured, repeatable work that AI handles well.

Middle management feels this hardest. So much of that role is moving information upward and aligning people with targets. That is exactly the part AI does well. Roles heavy on coordination and reporting are most exposed. Think operations, finance, logistics, customer service, administrative layers in tech and corporate environments. The more a job is about passing information along, the more of it can be automated.

So two forces stack. Fewer managers are needed because companies are smaller. And the managers who remain see their administrative tasks absorbed by AI. What is left is the leadership part. Each leader ends up with more direct reports, supported by AI for the coordination that used to fill the week.

What Survives Is Leadership

The human skills survive. Motivating people. Coaching them. Inspiring a direction worth following. Connecting individuals into something that works together. An agent can draft your forecast. It cannot sit with someone who has lost their confidence and help them find it again. As the administrative work gets absorbed, these become the core of the job rather than the soft edge of it. This is where leadership coaching earns its place, building the skills that AI cannot touch.

There is judgment too. Knowing which AI output to trust. Knowing what to ask in the first place. Becoming more AI savvy than the people around you. These compound over time. For leaders at director level, where the decisions get heavier and lonelier, coaching for senior leaders is a logical next step.

The Skill Most Leaders Skip

Self-awareness. Research by organizational psychologist Tasha Eurich, published in Harvard Business Review, found that while 95% of people claim to be self-aware, only 10 to 15% actually fit the criteria. That gap is where your blind spots sit, out of view. Interestingly, her work also found that senior leaders are often less self-aware than they assume, partly because honest feedback gets harder to find the higher you climb.

This is workable. Find your blind spots, work on them, and you give yourself a real head start while everyone else assumes they are already fine.

And yes, an executive coach telling you to invest in your own development. I see the optics there. I believe this is coming anyway, however much I dislike the idea. For most of us it comes down to upskilling or being left behind. I happen to think most of us are capable of the upskilling. For organisations that want to build these skills across a whole team, a management training programme is a practical way to start.

Where to Start

I work with leaders at every level, from new managers to directors, helping them get ready for what the next few years will ask of them. We look at where you stand, where your blind spots are, and which skills will keep you valuable as the work around you changes.

If you want to be one of the people who comes out of this stronger, let's have a chat. A free introduction, zero obligation.

AI Strategy for Executives: Where to Begin?

David Buirs - Leadership Coach & Management Trainer

An AI Strategy for Executives: Where Do You Actually Start?

David Buirs is a leadership and executive coach in Amsterdam. This post is about AI strategy at board level. You will learn why you need to use AI yourself, how to choose between being a frontrunner or a follower, how to balance safety with momentum, and what agents and AI mean for your HR policy.

Most boards talk about AI as if it were an IT project. Something for the floor below. A tool you buy and roll out.

That is a misunderstanding that costs you money later.

AI touches how your organisation makes decisions, how your people work, and which skills will still hold value in five years. Those are board questions. And still I see many senior leaders who delegate the conversation because AI is not really their thing.

That is where I want to start.

Learn To Use It Yourself. Really.

You do not need to become a prompt engineer. But you do need to know how it feels to work with these tools.

Write a tricky email with AI. Have a strategy memo summarised. Prepare a difficult conversation. You learn quickly where the technology is strong and where you need your own judgement.

Because once you use AI yourself, you recognise AI text instantly. Those smooth, tidy sentences. That overdone enthusiasm. Texts that sound profound but actually do not say much. Everyone around you recognises it by now too.

Say you send out a company-wide message that clearly came from ChatGPT. People see that. And they draw a conclusion about you. Your authority drops at the moment you least expect it. You wanted to be efficient and you came across as lazy.

Whoever has handled the technology themselves avoids that kind of blunder. You know when AI helps and when your own voice is needed.

Frontrunner or Follower? It Depends on Your Context

There is a real debate about timing. Two possible courses.

The frontrunner experiments early. Invests. Finds a path alone, makes mistakes, builds knowledge that competitors still lack. That costs money and it costs calm in the organisation.

The follower waits for the best practices to surface. Lets others learn the expensive lessons and adopts what works. Cheaper. But you fall behind, and sometimes that gap is hard to close.

Which posture fits depends on who you are.

Do you work in a sector with people who have an affinity for technology and AI? Where many processes run that may not be complex, but also do not call for a brand new creative solution every time? Think of a logistics or e-commerce business. Stable, repeating processes and people who understand how systems work. There agents are ideal and waiting is risky.

Do you work in a sector where a lot happens by hand, where the work is less process-driven? Think of a cleaning company. There the room for AI is smaller. Then it is wiser to take targeted steps and let the market do its work.

Looking honestly at your own situation is the whole craft here. Choose what fits your people and your market.

Safety: Involve Legal, but Keep Your Common Sense

Here you have to do two things at once.

Involve your lawyers early. Make sure no personal data or sensitive company data ends up in a public LLM. That is a real risk and the consequences can be large. Make agreements, choose the right tools, train your people on what is and is not allowed.

Stay within the rules. There is no debate about that.

And still I see organisations overshoot. Everything gets locked down out of fear. Every pilot has to pass three committees. The result is that nothing happens, while your competitor simply keeps working.

Too much legal thinking costs you your lead. Stay within the rules and keep your pace at the same time. That is the balance a board has to guard.

Autonomous Agents Move Faster Than You Think

The biggest change right now sits in agents. Small autonomous programs that carry out tasks on their own. Not a tool you operate, but a digital colleague that finishes work.

An example makes it concrete. A customer emails a complaint. The agent pulls up the file, checks the record, and assesses whether the complaint is justified. Is it valid? Then the agent can issue a refund itself and write an apology email. A human reviews things at the back end. And customers can object if they disagree with a decision. When this is done well, it saves time and money.

For repetitive processes the gain is enormous. And here is the striking part. Connected agents learn from each other. That can move fast.

Look at Prosus. With 40,000 employees, the company now runs more than 60,000 agents. Their own research shows a pattern that every board should know. Around 2% of active agents drive the bulk of the business impact.

That is a strategic lesson. You do not have to automate everything at once. You find the few places where agents make a real difference, and there you go all in.

HR Strategy: Which People Become More Important?

This is perhaps the conversation that gets avoided the longest.

Technical knowledge becomes worth less. Not worthless, but less scarce. AI can take over more and more of the work that used to need a specialist.

What rises in value are human skills. Curiosity. Judgement. The ability to connect. Coaching others. Handling change well.

That has consequences for who you consider important in your organisation.

The colleague who knows a great deal but is a mediocre team player becomes less central. And the person who brings people along, creates calm, and can move with uncertainty becomes indispensable. Research points the same way. The value of work moves from pure productivity toward human skills and meaning.

As a board, your promotions and your reviews decide what you reward. That is a choice you make now, not in three years. For leaders wrestling with these questions at the highest level, executive coaching amsterdam is a logical place to sharpen them.

Start Small. Make Someone Responsible.

The biggest mistake is waiting for the perfect plan. It does not come.

Run small experiments. Say you are a scale-up. Have your sales team use AI for a week to summarise and follow up on call notes. Measure what it delivers. Small, contained, measurable.

What works, you scale up. What does not work, you drop without regret.

And appoint someone. An AI ambassador who collects the small experiments and grows the good ones step by step. Someone with energy for the topic and standing in the organisation. Without an owner, every initiative evaporates. If you want to anchor this across the organisation in actual behaviour, a form of leadership development program is often the step that turns experiments into a new way of working.

To Close

An AI strategy for the board is about leadership. About understanding what is happening yourself, looking honestly at your context, and bringing your people along with something that can feel frightening.

You do not have to get it right in one go. You do have to understand it yourself. Running into this as a board member and want to think it through for your own situation? Interested or curious? Let's chat. Plan your free introduction here. Zero obligation.

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.