When Everyone Has AI, What Makes a Great Leader? 

Shifting from AI literacy to AI judgment

During the early years of generative AI adoption, higher education discussions focused primarily on teaching, learning, academic integrity, and institutional policy. Leaders understandably concentrated on which tools to allow, how to govern their use, and how to respond to rapid technological change.

Today, the conversation is shifting toward how higher education leaders can use AI tools responsibly and ethically to strengthen judgment and decision-making. We are discussing when and how we should trust AI to help us with critical decisions that must be made today to allow institutions to continue to reach students, provide research, and impact communities across the country.

We are also rethinking the work of humans. AI is causing leaders to reconsider not just how work is completed, but which work should remain human. As Kerr and I argued previously, institutions often need to redesign and automate underlying business processes before expecting AI to generate meaningful organizational value.

AI should not simply accelerate inefficient work; it should encourage leaders to rethink how work is designed. AI should complement human expertise to support progress toward the institution’s intended purpose.

In many cases, the greatest opportunity is not accelerating existing processes, it is redesigning work so that people spend less time producing routine outputs and more time exercising judgment, creativity, empathy, coaching, and relationship building. As leaders, we must balance when humans should slow down or change processes, to allow humans to do deeper, better work with students, communities, and employers.

Recent EDUCAUSE research supports this broader institutional shift, emphasizing that AI is now affecting virtually every institutional role, moving the conversation beyond student use to the work of faculty and staff across the institution.

Which leadership behaviors become more valuable because AI exists?

Other writers today are focusing on the jobs that will be replaced by AI in both higher education and in other workplaces. Perhaps a more important question is to ask which leadership behaviors become more valuable because AI exists. What are the capabilities and attributes that are needed by today’s leaders that must be part of the learning leader’s portfolio to be successful in leading both human and AI team members?

More than twenty years ago, my doctoral research explored the competencies required of future community college presidents (Cook, 2004). One conclusion remains true today: effective leadership has always depended upon a combination of enduring human capabilities and their capacity to learn new ones.

Reflecting on leadership within today’s climate more than twenty years later, we find that leaders often bring capabilities learned over the last several years that focus on institutional growth, building legacies on campuses, and understanding the impact of modalities on institutions. However, few have learned the necessary skills to include leadership abilities with AI in the mix. AI has created the need for a new set, and breadth, of leadership skills. Areas that need focus today that will support the concept of leading people include:

Human-AI collaboration is becoming more important than AI capability

As AI tools become commonplace, competitive advantage will come less from owning AI than from designing work that allows people and AI to collaborate effectively. Human-AI collaboration improves leadership because it improves thinking. In our work with Business Mapping Automation, we argued that processes must be evaluated for effectiveness before they are appropriately automated (Cook & Kerr, 2023). Business Mapping Automation identifies where human expertise adds the greatest value, and where automation can improve efficiencies without compromising quality or institutional behaviors.

AI should not simply accelerate existing processes. Leaders should first determine whether a process still serves the institution’s purpose. Accelerating an ineffective process simply produces ineffective outcomes more efficiently. Leadership that builds strong processes with human input and strong human judgment will support the growth of trust across the institution.

AI as a thought partner can assist us in challenging our own assumptions and biases as leaders to more intentionally support our organizational design. This approach could help us to create new and innovative approaches using a variety of thoughts and opportunities, by exploring data that we would otherwise not be able to examine. Alternative thought processes and alternative approaches to significant challenges will also assist in making sure that stakeholders from a variety of sectors are included in the decision-making processes.

Other thought partnership opportunities include the exploration of unintended consequences. Many times, higher education looks to solve one problem and develops a series of other issues and challenges due to its lack of awareness of the consequences. Our goal would be to strengthen our judgment through collaborative thinking approaches using AI, in order to bolster our executive thinking processes without replacing the human responsibility of decision-making.

Leadership development itself must be redesigned

For decades, leadership development has emphasized delegation, communication, conflict management, negotiation, supervision, and strategic planning. We spend significant amounts of time learning conflict management, negotiation, and supervision. We also spend much of our time on developing strategic planning, not just the processes, but also the components of systemic thinking that set strategic planning apart from a mere campus-wide exercise.

Today, we must develop new leadership capacities that include evaluating recommendations made by AI. As leadership teams consider AI recommendations, the work of using strong human thinking to build creativity remains central.

J. E. Aoun (Robot-Proof: Higher Education in the Age of Artificial Intelligence, 2017) argued that the future belongs to individuals who combine technological capability with uniquely human capacities. Higher education leadership requires a similar evolution. Rather than competing with AI, leaders must cultivate the distinctly human abilities that AI cannot replace, such as judgment, ethics, creativity, relationship building, and institutional purpose.

Leaders must continue to develop and teach others how to design work in ways that allow for the support of the human work environment and that also develop the discretion of knowing when not to use AI. Leaders must learn to facilitate productive human-AI collaboration while leading teams in ways that remain grounded in people, processes, and purpose.

AI should increase, not replace, critical thinking

AI should create more thinking, not less. It should allow leaders the time they need to think deeply and with greater inputs. It should allow leaders the ability to find comparable data, explore new ideas, and reveal hidden assumptions that lead to better determinations. AI should be a tool that is used by leaders to build leadership competencies such as excellent judgment and data-driven decision-making, and provide leaders with the ability to build trust within their institutions.

How should leaders develop people who increasingly work alongside AI?

As leaders develop their AI capabilities, the progression of AI use over time may look like this:

This progression only matters if it strengthens the three enduring responsibilities of leadership: developing people, improving processes, and advancing institutional purpose. The value of AI is measured not by how sophisticated the technology becomes, but by how effectively it enhances leadership in each of these three areas.

Answering the question of what makes a great leader today includes our focus of people, processes, and purpose. To assist us with this work, we design our work into human-AI workflows to allow us to ask better questions, and to use AI to explore alternatives to further support our judgment and create strong decisions. We must also continue to provide professional development for our teams and for ourselves as we learn to use the tools well to succeed as leaders today.