How Is AI Affecting Your Leadership Presence?

Artificial intelligence (AI) is changing how we work at a remarkable pace. At a basic level, it can summarize meetings, analyze data, draft communications, generate ideas, organize information and help you make decisions faster. But there’s a question you should be asking. How is AI changing the way you show up as a leader?

Your leadership presence is never simply about identifying and communicating the right answer or next action. It’s about how people experience you and your ability to create connection. So, how to use AI effectively without becoming less present to others?

Space to Lead

Regardless of which LLM or other AI tool you use, one of its greatest advantages is its ability to reduce the amount of time you spend on routine cognitive work. If you’ve used AI, you know that preparing a first draft, organizing notes, synthesizing information or identifying patterns can happen much faster.

Ideally, that creates more time for the work only a leader can do: listening, coaching, building trust, navigating uncertainty and helping people make sense of change. But that benefit isn’t automatic. If the time AI saves you gets filled with more emails, more analysis and more tasks, you might seem to be more productive without actually becoming more effective. So…

• Is AI creating more space for you to lead, or simply helping you seem to do more?
• How can you use AI to reduce administrative work and increase time with people?
• What leadership activities should you deliberately protect from automation?

Thinking Required

AI can produce a polished recommendation in seconds. That makes it tempting to accept an answer because it sounds confident, complete and well-reasoned. But leadership requires human judgment.

Leaders need to challenge assumptions, understand context, recognize what might be missing and ultimately take responsibility for decisions. AI can contribute to your thinking process, but it can never be a substitute for these skills. And your team needs to be confident that when you make a recommendation or decision, you understand why you’re making it. So…

• Are you using AI to strengthen your thinking or replace it?
• Do you challenge AI-generated recommendations before sharing them?
• Can you explain the reasoning behind your decisions without relying on the AI output?
• When does your knowledge, experience or organizational context tell you something that AI may not know?

Maintaining Authenticity

AI can help you write a thoughtful email or document, prepare talking points or refine a presentation. Used well, it can make communication clearer. But it’s easy to slip into the generic.

Your employees and colleagues will notice when communication feels inauthentic, overly polished or disconnected from who you are and your presence as a leader. So before sending AI-assisted communication, ask a couple of questions. Does this sound like me? Is it in line with how others experience me, or does it somehow feel automated or “fake”?

At KDIC, we’ve faced this issue ourselves. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but recently we’ve been using AI as a tool to help us write this enewsletter and other documents. We use it to help identify key points and generate first-draft copy. And then, most important, we do a deep edit. We personalize, add our own opinions and stories, generate additional strategies and just… well… make it sound (we hope!) authentically KDIC. We never use AI-generated copy that hasn’t been thoroughly reviewed, pondered and revised.

To Automate or Not

Perhaps the most important AI leadership skill is knowing when not to use it. Because, ultimately, you want AI to enhance your leadership and support your professional brand, not change it.

Your team members and colleagues are using AI too. And, in part, they’re forming opinions about AI by watching you. So it’s critical to your leadership presence that you remain human. Recognition should feel personal. Coaching means listening carefully. Trust will be built through interactions, not optimization.

Also, what leaders automate, and what they intentionally keep human, sends a message about what an organization values. That makes the use of AI a leadership behavior, not simply a technology decision.

The AI Challenge

AI will continue to become more capable and, potentially, omnipresent. Your leadership challenge isn’t to compete with that trend, but to become more intentional about the qualities it can’t provide: judgment, empathy, courage, curiosity, accountability and trust, for example.

So as you consider where AI fits into your leadership practice, don't only ask, “What can AI do for me?” The more important question is, “Who am I becoming as a leader because of how I use AI?”