The first time an AI system made a recommendation I disagreed with, I felt something I didn’t expect: ego.

It was a resource allocation call on a complex project. The model had crunched variables no person could hold in their head at once, and its recommendation was better than mine. Something in me didn’t want to let a model make that call. So, I made it myself.

I told this story to Michael Jabbour, AI innovation officer at Microsoft, expecting him to talk about the technology. Instead, he talked about authority. His point was that every new artificial intelligence tool changes who gets to decide, rather than what gets decided.

Since then, I keep coming back to one question: If intelligence doesn’t need a human body, what exactly makes someone a leader?

I’ve talked with executives, technologists, and researchers about this, including Jabbour and Avantika Sharma, global head of healthcare at Brillio, an enterprise AI company. The pattern I keep hearing is the same, and it’s that leadership is moving from directing people to designing systems. The job now is defining how humans and machines think together.

That sounds philosophical, but in practice it comes down to very specific leadership choices. Here are the shifts I’ve had to make in my own leadership:

Early in my career, I thought leadership meant being the smartest person in the room. I prepared harder than everyone else and made the decision before others. But that doesn’t work once intelligent systems become part of the workflow.

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