Leadership AI Training: Why Leaders Must Learn First | Newsletter February 2026

If your organisation is investing in AI, but your leaders aren't learning about it themselves, you're building on sand.

The message coming through loud and clear from recent research is this: AI transformation fails when leaders treat it as something to be rolled out by IT teams whilst they focus on "strategy." Because AI is the strategy. And if leaders don't understand it, they can't guide it.

The Trust Paradox

Confidence in AI is rising faster than organisational readiness to use it well. As futurist and best-selling author Bernard Marr points out, many leaders and employees feel optimistic about AI's potential, yet their organisations lack the skills, governance and processes needed to deploy it responsibly.

This creates a dangerous gap. Misplaced trust leads to poor decisions, over-reliance on AI outputs, and unaddressed failures. Trust must be earned through experience, transparency and understanding - and that starts at the top.

It's Not About Coding. It's About Judgement.

Leaders don't need to become technical experts. What they do need is AI literacy focused on business problem-solving. A McKinsey Quarterly article makes this clear: competitive advantage comes not from the technology itself, but from leaders who can connect business problems to AI possibilities.

Too many organisations underinvest in developing this "AI muscle" in their leadership, leaving a gap between technical teams and strategic decision-makers. This results in ambitious AI initiatives that don't align with business reality, or worse, AI tools deployed without anyone understanding where they add value and where they fail.

Leaders Set the Learning Culture

In a recent interview, Delta CEO Ed Bastian reflected on one of the hardest things a leader can do: admitting "I don't know." In the context of AI adoption, this humility isn't weakness - it's essential.

When leaders model curiosity, ask questions, and experiment with AI tools themselves, they normalise learning across the organisation. They show teams that uncertainty is part of the journey, and that it's okay not to have all the answers yet.

The alternative is leaders who stay distant from AI whilst pushing teams to adopt it, which breeds cynicism and anxiety.

The Anxiety You're Not Addressing

A Harvard Business Review article on team anxiety reveals that fear of AI often stems from uncertainty about job security and changing roles. And here's the key point: leaders who avoid these conversations make the anxiety worse.

Employees need honest dialogue about what AI will and won't do. They need to be involved in shaping how it's adopted. And they need training that builds confidence, not just tool skills.

But leaders can't have these conversations credibly if they haven't engaged with AI themselves. You can't reassure your team about something you don't understand.

Management Skills Are Now AI Skills

Here's a surprising insight from research by Ethan Mollick, Associate Professor at Wharton: the skills that make someone a good manager - delegating, scoping problems, defining deliverables, evaluating work - are exactly the skills needed to work effectively with AI agents.

As AI becomes more autonomous, human purpose becomes more important, not less. Leaders who can clearly articulate goals, supervise AI behaviour, and intervene when systems act unexpectedly will be the ones who extract real value.

But this requires understanding how AI works, where it fails, and what "good" looks like in your domain. It requires hands-on learning, not abstract briefings.

The Strategy Gap

According to the PwC Global CEO Survey, 42% of CEOs cite keeping pace with technological transformation as a top concern. Yet more than half of organisations report they've seen no significant financial benefit from AI to date. For most, it's because AI strategy is mismatched to organisational reality. Getting AI strategy right means grounding it in what your organisation can actually do - and building from there. But you can't assess readiness if you don't understand what AI requires.

Leading Through Disruption

AI won't distribute its benefits evenly. Some roles will change dramatically. Some teams will see productivity gains while others will face disruption. This means that leaders need to prepare teams for uneven change.

This isn't just about efficiency gains. It's about reskilling, redeployment and helping people navigate uncertainty. And it requires leaders who understand AI's strategic impact well enough to explain why certain changes are happening and how the organisation will support people through them.

The BCG Reality Check

Research from the Boston Consulting Group shows that as AI investment accelerates, leadership ownership becomes the decisive factor in whether organisations see real returns. AI can no longer be treated as a purely technical initiative. Senior leaders must step in to set direction, prioritise use cases, and ensure efforts align with business strategy.

But alignment only happens when leaders can translate AI ambition into executable actions. When they understand the difference between AI-first design and layering AI onto broken processes. When they can explain to their teams why certain trade-offs matter.

What Leaders Actually Need to Learn

This isn't about attending a one-day AI awareness session. Leaders need to:

Understand how AI works and where it fails - so they can evaluate outputs critically and build informed confidence rather than blind trust.

Experiment with AI tools in their own work - not to become power users, but to develop intuition about what AI can and can't do.

Learn to frame business problems for AI solutions - developing the shared language that bridges business and technical teams.

Build skills in supervision and oversight - because as AI becomes more autonomous, human judgement becomes more valuable, not less.

Prepare to lead hybrid human-AI teams - a fundamentally new management challenge that requires new capabilities.

The Bottom Line

AI transformation is a leadership transformation. The gap between AI ambition and AI reality is closed by leaders who invest in their own AI education first - then use that understanding to build capability, confidence and change-readiness across their teams.

As the World Economic Forum research on AI readiness makes clear: success requires organisational readiness, not just technical deployment. And organisational readiness starts with leaders who understand AI well enough to guide it.