How Gen AI Can Create More Time for Leadership

This article was originally published in Harvard Business Review

Leaders today are facing a crisis of employee engagement and trust in company leadership. According to Gallup, U.S. employee engagement dropped to 31% in 2024, the lowest level in a decade, with 17% of employees actively disengaged. The 2025 Edelman Trust Barometer found that only 75% of employees worldwide trust their employers to act with integrity—a three-point decline from previous years.

These trends put more pressure on leaders to strengthen their focus on the human elements of leadership—awareness, clear communication, and compassion, for example. Yet our recent study of over 300 leaders (soon to be published here) found that only 16% have the human qualities like these that enable them to enhance engagement, build trust, and create high-performing teams.

The impact is profound. Leaders who score poorly on these qualities have employees with 49% lower trust in company leadership, 39% lower organizational commitment, and 59% higher intention to quit than those who score highly. And there’s great upside; leaders who scored highly on strong human leadership qualities enjoy work environments where employees have 97% higher trust, 65% higher organizational commitment, and 37% lower intention to quit than those of the leaders who scored poorly.

In our work with forward-thinking companies, we have found that although the adoption of AI is creating greater uncertainty and fears about workplace disruption, contributing to these trends of lower engagement and trust, there are also significant opportunities to actually leverage AI to help leaders deploy these human skills that are so needed, especially now. While much of the focus on organizational AI adoption has been about the technology, in our experience, the rapidly evolving landscape of AI in the workplace has the potential to improve the human leadership of organizations.

One company embracing this approach is IBM. As you might expect, IBM has a strong focus on providing leaders with AI systems and tools to enhance efficiency and effectiveness. But they are also using the introduction of AI to help leaders focus more on the human side of leading. In our work with IBM, as well as what we have seen in other companies, we identified three steps we recommend to firms looking to succeed in this new age of AI:

1. Reframe your time-saving AI strategy as an opportunity to refocus on human leadership.

2. Use the time saved to build leaders’ soft skills, redefining what “good leadership” looks like for your company.

3. Help leaders leverage gen AI to enhance their human leadership.

Here’s how these steps work in practice.

‍

Reframe Your Time-Saving Strategy

‍Like many organizations, IBM’s journey with generative AI in human resources (HR) began with simplifying processes. One of the first targets was the promotions process.

Historically, as in many organizations, IBM’s leaders spent countless hours collecting information, filling out forms, and submitting documentation to promote their people—an experience many found overly bureaucratic and burdensome. Senior vice president and chief human resources officer Nickle LaMoreaux and her team identified this process as an early candidate for AI automation.

But in an early conversation, before automation began, a leader explained how they thought about the stakes of the project to LaMoreaux: “Every minute I spend in these processes is a minute I am not with my team.” That comment marked a turning point in the process redesign: Their goal shifted from simply saving time to using time more meaningfully.

“Do I want leaders entering data?” LaMoreaux explained why she embraced the shift, “Or would I rather have them sitting face to face with an employee sharing why they did or did not get a promotion and what are the next steps in their development journey?”

The focus of AI implementation for the HR group became not just about reducing administrative work but about creating more time and space for leaders to lead their people. For example, the company’s AskHR agent now allows managers to complete administrative tasks like promotion paperwork or transferring an employee to another manager 75% faster than in the existing HR systems, LaMoreaux told us. To encourage them to spend that newly found time on their people, the company embraced LaMoreaux’s plan of setting new expectations for their leaders.

‍

‍Use the Time to Refocus on Soft Skills

While over the years there have been many arguments for the importance of soft skills in leadership, our observation from our work with many companies is that they often only give lip service to training in these areas. But we are now facing a major inflection point in what it means to be a leader; as AI transforms the nature of work, these essentially human skills are becoming even more critical. Accordingly, companies need to make concrete changes to the way they develop them in their leaders to adequately prepare them.

IBM has set human skills as core expectations and measures leaders at all levels on them, integrating them into performance discussions. Practically this has meant that in addition to evaluating leaders on their ability to drive business outcomes and build skills in their people, they have added a third element to performance expectations: leadership behaviors.

These center around three pillars: people, execution, and strategy. The first of these, the people pillar, is focused on cultivating the human leadership capabilities needed to thrive in a tech-augmented future. This means leading with authenticity, courage, and empathy—modeling values, empowering others, and fostering a culture of belonging where diverse voices thrive. It’s about earning trust through genuine care.

With the introduction of the simplified, AI-automated HR processes, LaMoreaux and her team were explicit with leaders about how to use the time they gained. When leaders saved time on the performance management process, the HR team encouraged them to use that time saved to have a conversation with the person who didn’t get the promotion, for example, to talk about how they could do better next time. These conversation guides were explicitly tied to using the time saved.

To reinforce the importance of all of these leadership behaviors, over 70% of IBM executives were given 360-degree feedback in 2024. This effort was designed to establish a baseline for future assessments, increase the leaders’ own self-awareness, and send a clear signal that human-centered leadership is foundational to IBM’s future.

For managers, IBM redefined all roles to place more emphasis on leading people versus simply managing tasks. To support leaders with these activities, HR provides toolkits and coaching on enhancing human leadership skills, such as giving timely and effective feedback. They also introduced guidelines and resources to help leaders hold regular conversations linking individual and team priorities to core organizational objectives. IBM’s signature new-manager training is being updated to include practical guidance on leveraging AI to practice difficult conversations and giving feedback. Additionally, a new online module, “Leading in the Age of Gen AI,” is being released for all leaders to help them navigate and lead effectively in an AI-enabled workplace. Finally, all managers who have been in their roles 6–18 months receive a 360-degree assessment designed to provide feedback on their demonstration of these specific behaviors.

Data from both the 360 assessments and the engagement survey will be used to continuously inform and refine IBM’s leadership development strategy.

‍

‍Help Leaders Use AI as a Leadership Coach

As we’ve studied the impact of AI on leadership for the past three years, we’ve been surprised to learn that artificial intelligence, if used wisely, can paradoxically help leaders be “more human.”

Because many widely available generative AI systems have been programmed with insights into all aspects of human behavior, they serve as a valuable resource for leaders to better connect with their employees. Leaders can query them for coaching, role play, suggested language for difficult situations, and more.

However, organizations should help leaders use AI to enhance their presence, rather than automating relationships. In our work, successful leaders look to augment their leadership with AI, helping people feel genuinely seen, heard, and valued with advice from a bot—rather than simply copying and pasting or parroting its language. Organizations should establish guidelines to help leaders understand how to use the tools without becoming over-reliant on them and diminishing their own human contribution.

IBM encourages leaders to use AI as a coach to help prepare for difficult conversations or reflect on their own development areas and potential biases. At the same time, they are careful not to let AI undermine authenticity. When leaders use AI-generated content without care, the results can feel inauthentic. “There should always be a human in the loop,” LaMoreaux told us. “The goal isn’t to sound perfect. It’s to sound like you and ensure you enhance both clarity and connection in your communication.”

. . .

While it is still too early to confirm the impact of these initiatives, it’s clear that IBM is making a bet on the power of human leadership skills, and finding ways to use the time freed up by AI to focus on them.

“We don’t have everything figured out when it comes to leadership and AI,” LaMoreaux said. “This space is constantly changing. But we know a different kind of leader is required in the AI era, and we’re doing our best to support our leaders to rise to the occasion and be truly human centered leaders.”

As companies invest in AI systems and tools to enhance efficiency, they have a parallel opportunity to invest in developing leaders’ human qualities. Any organization—regardless of size or sector—can make human-centered leadership a measurable standard.