In the age of AI, the CEO’s role is evolving: adopting technology is not enough, leadership needs reinventing. The article explores how leaders can guide hybrid ecosystems, harness the organization’s Digital DNA, and promote responsible innovation, able to combine efficiency, meaning and wellbeing.
Authors: Valentina Marmiroli, Marco Pinciroli
In the age of AI, innovation is moving faster than our capacity to adapt. For CEOs, leading AI means transforming culture, skills and relationships. The real question is not whether AI improves the business, but whether it makes leaders more clear-headed, credible, and able to give meaning to technology adoption.
One might answer that it’s a matter of balancing risks and benefits, simplifying and drawing on the many papers that present AI as THE solution or as the BEGINNING of dissolution. According to BCG, CEOs need to train like athletes: sprinting to accelerate, running marathons to sustain the effort. It’s about building strength and speed in order to invest strategically, accelerate adoption, and secure the best talent.
But how much time can a leader devote to training?
It is now clear that AI requires not just new tools, but also new skills and mindsets: learning, interpreting and guiding innovation becomes a daily challenge. In a context of continuous innovation and accelerated technological transformation, leaders must find their way through a relentless stream of information, decisions and changes. They often find themselves surrounded by diverging opinions and partial views on AI, reported by the key figures in the organization they rely on for strategic decisions.
In this scenario, one solution could be an “AI Sparring Partner”, an external, independent figure who helps CEOs navigate complexity, distinguishing passing trends from real opportunities and helping to develop a more conscious, disciplined approach to AI adoption. Like a personal AI trainer, this figure stimulates critical thinking, promotes clarity in moments of uncertainty, and facilitates ongoing dialogue with the organization, helping leaders understand, decide and guide change with clarity and vision.
The first step? Knowing your organization’s Digital DNA
Every organization that intends to approach AI in an effective, mature and safe way must start from a key premise: knowing its own Digital DNA — in essence, the company’s “digital genetics”. This is not just about checking for the presence of technical skills, but about mapping in depth the skills, attitudes and cultural maturity that characterize its people and teams.
For a CEO, this awareness has two key implications:
- Anticipating realistic AI development, identifying processes and areas that are already ready and those that need training or redesign.
- Attracting and retaining talent, because people stay where innovation is concrete and consistent with the corporate culture.
In other words, Digital DNA becomes the compass for AI transformation: if the CEO knows it and uses it as a guide, they can “train” the organization to use AI not as an imposition, but as a natural extension of existing skills and culture. This is how the leader becomes a true role model for innovation.
Once a considered choice has been made, is the CEO’s training over? No, actually it isn’t
Once AI has been “legitimized” within the company, how strict should the ethical boundaries be, and how essential, on the other hand, can it be to involve a human operator?
Here too, the decisive role of whoever holds the position of CEO comes into play. In the most forward-looking boards, AI governance and oversight are not a “technical” extension of the IT function, but a strategic responsibility of top management.
As MIT Sloan Management Review writes, CIOs and CTOs play essential roles in technical implementation, but sometimes lack either the time or the mandate to address the broader human and organizational implications of an AI-driven transformation. Organizations therefore need a new kind of leader. This is fueling the idea of a Chief Innovation & Transformation Officer (CITO), combining technical skills, behavioral insight and strategic vision with a deep understanding of organizational psychology and cultural change. A leader who must know how to:
- Navigate complex ethical contexts
- Foster the cultural transformation of work and thinking
- Manage human-AI collaboration, understanding both AI’s capabilities and human skills and psychology
- Break down silos by promoting cross-functional integration
- Ensure responsible innovation, balancing opportunities, risks and social impact
CEOs in the agentic era: from managing people to guiding ecosystems of humans and agents
“I’ll be the last CEO of Salesforce to have managed only human beings,” said Marc Benioff. It’s a snapshot of an inevitable transition: leaders no longer just manage people, but orchestrate hybrid ecosystems of talent and AI agents — systems capable of planning, acting, remembering and learning autonomously.
Complicating the picture is the talent factor. Generative AI and AI agents are creating new professions faster than companies can fill them. The “talent puzzle” is no longer a long-term issue but a daily urgency, so much so that a recent IBM analysis shows that only 25% of CEOs say they have obtained the expected return on investment from AI, only 16% have achieved a real company-wide impact, and 2 out of 3 CEOs (67%) say that having the right skills in key roles is the real competitive factor.
In other words: adopting tools is not enough — what’s needed is building a leadership and skills ecosystem capable of making transformation real and scalable. A change of mindset is urgently needed, to turn every manager into a leader able to manage an increasingly hybrid workforce. This is not about small adjustments, but a genuine reinvention of the operating model. Hence the uncomfortable question for every CEO and organizational leader: Are we using AI to optimize what we already do, or are we ready to reinvent who we are? A particularly relevant question, given that, according to the results of Arthur D. Little’s new CEO Insights 2025, today only 29% of CEOs have an AI strategy integrated at the company level. The difference will be made by those who manage to shift their center of gravity: from tactical efficiency to reinventing the core business, from fragmented adoption to genuinely becoming AI-driven.
But the last question, more relevant than ever in an increasingly tech-centric context: in the age of AI, is happiness really possible?
Whoever is CEO is the cultural sponsor who integrates and speeds up the various levers driving cultural change. Their responsibility does not end with integrating organizational levers, cross-functional collaboration, HR systems, and leadership teams as role models, but extends to social stewardship: preventing AI from becoming an alienating practice, generating isolation, a loss of creativity, or that “technological bulimia” that reduces people to mere digital operators.
If AI becomes routine without considering people’s engagement, it only creates a further human-computer dependency that does not foster the social interaction that matters for work and for people’s wellbeing.
The risk is the one Chaplin described in “Modern Times”: professionals turned into cogs of a system that accelerates but does not nourish. The leader’s challenge is the opposite: to create contexts in which AI frees up time for relationships, collaboration and human ingenuity, restoring meaning and happiness to work.
A CEO who uses AI with awareness, who talks about it and shows its benefits, becomes a credible role model and offers people tools not to replace them, but to help them grow. It is in this balance, between efficiency and humanity, between technology and meaning, that true leadership in the age of AI is measured. CEOs: are you ready to take on this challenge?
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- BCG — JULIE BEDARD, NICOLAS DE BELLEFONDS — The CEO’s Workout for Peak AI Performance — BCG — March 18, 2025
- ANDREA CAVALLARO, EDLIRA GJOKHILAJ, ALESSANDRO MARIA MAZZA — Generative AI skills, a model for mapping and developing them
- MIT Sloan Management Review — FAISAL HOQUE, THOMAS H. DAVENPORT, ERIK NELSON — Why AI Demands a New Breed of Leaders — April 9, 2025
- https://www.ibm.com/downloads/documents/us-en/12f5a711174dc2ac
- CEO Insights, proactively embracing change