Nick Jankel: When Intelligence Becomes Abundant – What Will We Still Need Human Leaders For?

Guest article by futurist Nick Jankel:

Artificial intelligence is not only changing how we work. It is changing how we think about knowledge, expertise, and leadership itself. Analysis, research, pattern recognition, prediction, coding, and increasingly sophisticated problem-solving can now be supported or automated by AI.

Something that was scarce for much of human history is becoming widely available: analytical intelligence.

This leaves me with a question I believe every leader and organization needs to consider: If AI can increasingly analyze, reason, predict, and optimize, what will human leadership be for?

I do not believe the answer is about trying to outthink the machine. Instead, the leadership premium is shifting toward capabilities that cannot be generated through data and computational power alone.

AI can generate answers. Leaders must decide which answers matter.

Today’s AI systems can process enormous amounts of information, develop scenarios, and compare possible courses of action at extraordinary speed.

Yet analysis alone cannot answer one of leadership’s most important questions:

What should we do?

Decisions are not made from facts alone. They depend on purpose, values, people, culture, risk, responsibility, and context.

This is why I believe contextual judgment is becoming an increasingly important leadership capability.

Leaders must understand not only what technology makes possible but also which possibilities make sense for their organization.

AI might identify the fastest, cheapest, or most efficient option. Whether that option is right for a company’s customers, employees, culture, and long-term ambitions remains a human leadership decision.

Moving from AI adoption to AI transformation

In my work with leaders and organizations, I often see very different approaches to AI grouped together under the broad heading of “AI adoption.”

But not every use of AI represents transformation.

Using an AI copilot to save an employee 30 minutes a day is fundamentally different from redesigning an entire workflow around intelligent AI agents. And both are different again from developing entirely new products, services, operating models, and sources of value.

I therefore find it useful to think about these opportunities across three different horizons:

Adoption: AI improves existing tasks and processes.

Evolution: Workflows, roles, and operating models are redesigned around AI.

Transformation: Leaders explore entirely new forms of value creation made possible by abundant analytical intelligence.

The third horizon requires much more than technical knowledge.

It requires imagination and the willingness to challenge assumptions.

Organizations that use AI purely to make today’s processes more efficient may achieve significant productivity gains while still missing much larger strategic opportunities.

AI can optimize the existing system. We must know when to redesign it.

Artificial intelligence is extraordinarily good at operating within defined structures.

It can analyze more information, accelerate processes, codify expertise, and optimize established systems.

But leaders face a different question:

What if the existing system itself is no longer the right one?

Organizations need structures, processes, and clear responsibilities to perform effectively. Yet those same structures can eventually constrain innovation.

This is where what I call ambidextrous leadership becomes particularly relevant.

Leaders need to move between two very different modes of thinking.

In execution mode, expertise, discipline, focus, and speed matter enormously.

In creative and transformational mode, we need to loosen assumptions, explore alternatives, and ask whether a workflow, product, organizational structure, or business model should be fundamentally redesigned.

The leadership challenge is knowing when to optimize the existing box – and when to step outside it long enough to build a better one.

Transformation requires space away from business as usual

One of the biggest barriers to meaningful AI transformation is also one of the most practical: everyday work.

Senior leaders spend much of their time dealing with decisions, meetings, targets, operational problems, and immediate priorities. This focus is necessary to keep organizations performing.

But it also leaves little space for fundamental questions.

• What would this workflow look like if we designed it from scratch today?
• Which tasks will genuinely require people in the future?
• What new customer experiences become possible with Agentic AI?
• What new business models emerge when knowledge and analytical capability become widely available?
• Questions like these are difficult to explore between two operational meetings.

From my experience, AI transformation therefore requires deliberately creating space for strategic thinking, experimentation, debate, and redesign.

Leadership offsites, executive retreats, and focused transformation sessions can give senior teams the opportunity to step outside business as usual, challenge assumptions, and develop a clearer view of where AI can create genuine strategic value.

The purpose is not to slow the organization down.

It is to step away long enough to understand where to accelerate next.

Human intelligence and artificial intelligence are not the same thing

Discussions about AI often assume that intelligence exists on a single scale: humans possess a certain amount of it, machines develop more of it, and eventually one overtakes the other.

I increasingly believe this is too simplistic.

AI models learn from the extraordinarily rich traces that humans have created: language, images, code, mathematics, scientific papers, stories, arguments, explanations, and vast quantities of other data.

Human beings experience reality differently.

We learn through relationships, physical experience, successes, mistakes, needs, consequences, and interactions with the world around us. This gives human intelligence a deeply embodied, relational, and contextual dimension.

That does not make human intelligence universally superior.

It makes human and artificial intelligence fundamentally different.

And those differences may become increasingly valuable.

The more capable AI becomes, the more valuable certain human capabilities may be

As analysis, research, prediction, and optimization become easier to access, leadership value begins to shift.

Capabilities such as these become increasingly important:

• understanding context and complexity
• asking better questions
• challenging assumptions
• imagining alternatives
• balancing competing priorities
• building relationships and trust
• creating meaning and direction
• taking responsibility for consequences

Leaders therefore do not need to compete with AI on processing speed or information retrieval.

Their role is increasingly about creating a productive synthesis between human and artificial intelligence.

AI can reveal possibilities. We must decide which possibilities are worth pursuing.

AI can generate scenarios. We must take responsibility for the consequences.

AI can optimize existing systems. We must recognize when it is time to design better ones.

Nick Jankel on AI leadership: It requires more than AI literacy

For me, one thing is clear: teaching leaders how to use AI tools will not be enough in the years ahead.

AI leadership requires the ability to combine technological capability with judgment, imagination, strategic thinking, and responsibility.

The more powerful artificial intelligence becomes, the more important another question becomes alongside it: What kind of human leadership do we need to develop?

Perhaps the defining question for leaders is therefore no longer: How intelligent will AI become?

It is: What kind of leaders will we need when analytical intelligence becomes cheap, abundant, and available everywhere?

Book Nick Jankel, AI Keynote Speaker & AI Transformation Facilitator

Nick Jankel is a Cambridge-educated thought leader, internationally sought-after keynote speaker, and AI transformation advisor trusted by organizations including Microsoft, AbbVie, LEGO, and Unilever.

His AI keynotes and AI leadership programs combine artificial intelligence with leadership, transformation, and human creativity. Nick helps executives and teams move beyond buzzwords and short-term efficiency gains to build organizations that combine the strengths of human and artificial intelligence.

Book Nick Jankel as a keynote speaker: nick.jankel@premium-speakers.com or +49 (0)60 327 859 393