PERSPECTIVE
The leadership edge in AI
The leadership practices that turn AI ambition into enterprise value
10-MINUTE READ
July 23, 2026
Nine in ten CxOs are increasing their investment in AI, yet enterprise-wide impact often remains elusive.1 The gap is not AI investment. It is leadership readiness. Our research found that when organizations invest in talent differently, they deliver stronger revenue and profit growth than their peers. Yet only 18% are leading the way with these investments.1 AI models, data and technical architecture matter, but they will not create enterprise value unless leaders operate with clearer discernment, navigate uncertainty with confidence and effectively mobilize the people around them.
AI doesn't just reshape what organizations do. It rewrites competitive advantage, compresses decision cycles and elevates the importance of human judgment and accountability. For leaders, this means something fundamental has shifted. Change is no longer a phase to manage through. Leading people through continuous change is now central to the job. In our work across the C-suite and beyond, we have seen that successful reinvention is modeled, not mandated. Three core principles—curiosity, courage and connection—consistently separate leaders who deliver on AI’s promise from those who stall. Curiosity keeps leaders open to possibility when pressure narrows thinking. Courage enables them to act before certainty arrives and connection builds the trust people need to move through change.
Reinvent a personal leadership playbook first
The old playbook no longer applies. AI is rewriting the conditions of leadership and habits that once served leaders well are now potential liabilities. Leaders have to do the hard work of understanding what is required of them. Curiosity, courage and connection are the foundational principles that help leaders interrupt old patterns and build the capacity to lead differently. And while the stakes are highest at the top, these qualities matter at every level of the organization.
DATA
AI is everywhere—but enterprise value is rare. Here’s the difference
9 in 10
CxOs are increasing their investment in AI, yet enterprise-wide impact often remains elusive.1
Only 18%
are making investments in talent differently which deliver stronger revenue and profit growth than their peers.1
Curiosity
Curious leaders pressure-test assumptions shaping the organization’s direction, surface tradeoffs early and make better decisions while the path is still forming.
Curiosity is critical in this environment where cognitive overload, speed and uncertainty can push organizations back toward familiar patterns. Leaders who resist that pull create the conditions for others to raise risks, test the prevailing logic and surface problems early. This keeps the organization moving forward, rather than defaulting to the status quo.
The most effective leaders are not learning about AI from a distance. They roll up their sleeves and engage directly with the work: testing, redesigning and seeing what changes when AI is applied to decisions and processes. Learning signals comfort with experimentation and demonstrates that good judgment matters more than perfect information. Yet few operate this way today. Our research finds that only 12% of leaders say they can move fast and iterate with limited information, even though that is precisely what reinvention asks of them.2
The leaders who close that gap treat AI as something to be understood through direct experience, not delegated to a technical team. They test it against real decisions, observe what changes and use that firsthand knowledge to guide others with credibility.
Knowing what needs to change is a first step. The real test is finding the courage to do it.
DATA
Only 12%
of leaders say they can move fast and iterate with limited information.
Courage
Courage is one of the qualities that most consistently separates leaders who deliver lasting transformation from those who don't.
It shows up in multiple ways: setting bold ambitions rather than hedging, taking intelligent risks and letting go of approaches and assumptions that no longer serve the organization.
Courage is also deeply personal. Many executives have built their careers on being the most informed and decisive person in the room. AI disrupts that dynamic, which for many leaders is core to their identity. Acknowledging that discomfort rather than masking it is itself an act of courage and helps build the trust needed to lead others through the change. This is harder to practice than it sounds. Making hard decisions before the evidence is complete, standing behind the decisions visibly and holding themselves accountable as conditions change asks something different of leaders whose credibility has long rested on having the answers.
There is also an ethical dimension to courage. Leaders need to be transparent about how AI is being used and to ensure accountability sits with humans in the lead. Courage has an organizational edge too: setting clear expectations for responsible adoption, ensuring AI investments advance the broader strategy and making hard choices about where to focus resources. And sometimes it means knowing where not to deploy AI and having the discipline to put governance structures in place before costs, complexity and risks spiral.
That kind of restraint takes as much resolve as bold action.
Connection
Courage gets decisions made while connection carries them through.
Trust is built not by what leaders announce but by what people see them do, especially when uncertainty is high and people are deciding whether it is safe to speak candidly, challenge assumptions or commit to change.
The leaders who get it right slow down first. They make space to listen and genuinely understand where people are. What are they worried about? What have they already tried that didn't work? These conversations don't slow transformation down; they are what make it possible. People often resist change not because they oppose the new direction, but because they have not felt heard. The stakes are real. Nearly half of employees report anxiety about job displacement.3 Left unaddressed, that fear is one of the most powerful brakes on transformation.
Leaders who listen with empathy, then build and share a narrative that connects the change to purpose, not just productivity, help people understand why the change matters for them and for customers. By being honest about the difficulties and clear about the purpose, leaders deepen the trust that brings people with them.
That trust is also what allows bold decisions to travel. The leaders who sustain transformation build coalitions across the C-suite early, so that change is not carried by one function and dropped when priorities shift. Yet that groundwork is rarely laid. Fewer than half of leaders say they actively encourage open dialogue to align teams and navigate change together.4
Involving the people most affected from the start, and maintaining those alliances under pressure, is what keeps change on track.
DATA
>50%
of leaders encourage open dialogue to align teams and navigate change together.
One major global bank was going through a significant transformation with a fragmented senior executive team. Highly capable individually, these leaders were pulling in different directions, threatening to undermine the change before it had a chance to take hold. Our structured leadership acceleration program worked at both the individual and collective level. Each executive received coaching and a 360-degree assessment. At the team level, quarterly development sessions built shared norms around prioritization, accountability, and how leaders challenge and support one another. A critical enabler was the CEO’s public commitment to confidentiality, which created the conditions for genuine openness.
The team built a shared language for honest feedback, reducing the friction that typically stalls senior leadership groups. Leaders who had previously avoided difficult conversations were actively coaching peers and sharing talent across teams—a concrete sign of enterprise thinking over territorial behavior.
Develop real technology fluency
AI is no longer a productivity tool layered onto existing work. It is becoming fundamental to the operating system through which enterprises run. Accenture analysis of 2,660 CEOs across Global 3000 companies suggests that the leaders creating the most value are not the ones who sponsor AI from a distance. They engage with it directly, exploring what it can actually do in their business and letting that understanding change how they lead.5
Executives recognize what is at stake. Asked what will most determine leadership success over the next two years, leaders put AI and data fluency at the top of the list.6 That means setting the standard for how humans and AI work together: championing adoption, increasing fluency, and keeping humans accountable for the decisions that matter. Human in the lead is treated as a leadership principle, not just a governance checkbox. People set the goals, define the guardrails, make the tradeoffs and remain accountable for outcomes.
Leaders who engage directly with technology drive greater support for a shared vision, making it easier for everyone around them to act with confidence and improve the quality of decisions across the organization. The executives who create the most value treat AI fluency as a leadership responsibility that evolves as technology does, rather than a credential to acquire once and move on from.
Build the culture to accelerate AI adoption
Culture does not shift because leaders announce new expectations. It shifts when people see what leaders pay attention to, what they question and how they behave when it matters most. Practiced visibly and consistently, the curiosity, courage and connection that distinguish breakthrough leaders become organizational norms, shaping how people around them think, decide and act. The most powerful way to spread them isn't through frameworks or directives. It's through honesty. When leaders name the difficulty, admit the doubt and share the discomfort of navigating something genuinely new, they don't lose authority; they create the conditions for others to lead.
The executives who build culture most durably are intentional about developing those below them—giving them real responsibility, visibility on decisions that matter and room to be tested. That is harder than it sounds. Many executives have built their authority on being the person others turn to when the stakes are highest, and that identity is genuinely difficult to give up. But those who do send a message no values statement can: the people around them are worth investing in. This is not a loss of influence. It is how culture compounds.
When a leader says ‘this is hard for me too’, they give everyone around them permission to lead as well.
When a leader says, ‘this is hard for me too’, they give everyone around them permission to lead as well. That honesty is what turns a single leader’s courage into something an entire organization can act on.
It begins with you
The most important test of leadership is not strategic, it is behavioral. And in a world of continuous change, that test never ends. The leaders who translate AI investment into sustained value are those who apply the same rigor to understanding themselves as they do to understanding their business. They reflect honestly, seek challenge from others and change how they lead as a result.
Accenture is fundamentally reimagining how we develop leaders for an era of continuous reinvention.
We combine executive coaching, cutting-edge assessments and psychometrics to reveal how our leaders think, decide, and show up and then translate those insights into precisely targeted development that moves the needle. For our most senior leaders, this means high-touch, individualized journeys that deliver a clear-eyed view of their effectiveness and a concrete path to evolve it. But insight alone isn't enough. We guide leaders on specific strategies that will support their growth and development, in line with their assessment data and aspirations. This could include more ongoing coaching, specific training, on-the-job exposure or assignments, or role rotation opportunities to further stretch and expand their knowledge and experience.
And because AI is reshaping every dimension of leadership, we're embedding AI fluency at the core of our development agenda. This goes beyond literacy. We're equipping leaders with the hands-on capability to harness AI as a decision-making tool, challenge assumptions with data, and lead teams through AI-driven transformation with confidence.
The result: leaders who don't just navigate change; they actively shape it.
That kind of investment in self-awareness starts with asking the right questions and revisiting them regularly. Not as a checklist, but as a discipline:
- Where are you challenging your own assumptions and how is that changing the way you lead?
- Where and how are you taking a clear stand and making the harder choices, and what happens if you don’t?
- How are you bringing people with you through reinvention and building trust?
- How are you using AI to reshape decisions, direction and value creation?
- What do you need to change in how you lead over the next 12 months?
The leaders who ask these questions honestly, and keep asking them as the work evolves, are the ones most likely to help translate AI investment into lasting, enterprise-wide value.
Sources
1 Accenture, Talent Reinventors Delivering value with and for people in the age of AI, March 2026.
2 Ibid.
3 Ibid.
4 Ibid.
5 “Five traits of tech-driven CEOs”, reprinted from MIT Sloan Management Review, (c) Massachusetts Institute of Technology, 2025. The article Five traits of tech-driven CEOs originally published on October 30, 2025.
6 Accenture, Talent Reinventors Delivering value with and for people in the age of AI, March 2026.