Organizations are making an extraordinary bet on AI.

Gartner forecasts that worldwide AI spending will reach $2.59 trillion in 2026—a 47% increase in just one year. Of that, more than $1.4 trillion will be invested in AI infrastructure alone.

Think about the scale of that investment.

New platforms. New copilots. New automation. New data infrastructure. New capabilities. Organizations are betting heavily on AI to deliver productivity, speed, growth and competitive advantage. But there is another investment question we should be asking:

Are we investing enough in the leaders who must turn all this technology into business performance?

The technology is advancing faster than leadership

AI is changing more than how work gets done. It is changing what organizations need from people, and particularly from leaders.

For decades, organizations rewarded leaders for knowing more, having experience, solving problems and providing answers. Leadership development reflected this reality. We built capabilities around strategic thinking, execution, expertise, communication and managing performance. Now AI can analyze enormous quantities of information, generate alternatives, identify patterns and produce sophisticated outputs in seconds.

The competitive advantage of simply knowing more is declining. That doesn’t make leaders less important. It makes a different set of leadership capabilities more valuable.

What happens when access to intelligence is no longer scarce?

The differentiator shifts from having intelligence to knowing what to do with it.

The next competitive advantage is Human Intelligence

AI gives organizations access to extraordinary computational and aggregate intelligence. But it cannot assume human responsibility for a decision’s consequences.

That is where Human Intelligence becomes increasingly important.

• Leaders need the critical thinking to challenge an AI-generated answer rather than accept it automatically.
• They need emotional intelligence to understand how technological change affects people.
• They need the intuition to recognize signals that data alone may not reveal.
• They need the judgment to make difficult decisions when no perfect answer exists.
• They need the creativity to imagine possibilities beyond what already exists.
• And they need the wisdom to ask not simply Can we do this? but should we?
• These capabilities have always mattered. AI makes them commercially critical.

The investment equation may be wrong

There is a danger that organizations are investing disproportionately in one side of the transformation equation.

AI Investment + Technology Adoption ≠ Business Value

A more complete equation is:

AI Capability × Human Intelligence × Leadership Capability = Business Impact

The multiplication matters.

You can have extraordinary technology, but if leaders cannot challenge its outputs, redesign work, exercise judgment, build trust, develop people and make better decisions, the return on that technology investment will be constrained.

Gartner’s own research reinforces this point. It found that stronger corporate performance is associated not simply with how much organizations spend on AI, but with how intentionally they deploy it against customer, product, growth and decision-making opportunities. That makes leadership capability part of the AI business case.

Leadership development needs to catch up

We are preparing to spend $2.59 trillion on AI in a single year. Yet how much attention are organizations giving to upgrading the human capabilities required to extract value from it?

The next generation of leadership development cannot simply add an “AI module” to an existing curriculum. We need to reconsider what leadership excellence looks like as intelligence itself becomes abundant.

Leaders must learn to collaborate with AI without becoming dependent on it. They must use technology to strengthen people’s capabilities rather than allow them to atrophy. They must create environments where experimentation and speed coexist with critical thinking, accountability, and sound human judgment.

The organizations that win the AI race may not be those that invest the most in technology.

They may be those that recognize a fundamental shift:

As Artificial Intelligence becomes more powerful, Human Intelligence becomes more valuable.

We are rapidly upgrading our technology.

The commercial question is:

Are we upgrading our leaders at the same pace?

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