What is AI-driven leadership?
Table of Contents
By: Jhoni Jackson, Edited by: Gabriela Pérez Jordán
Published: March 19, 2025
Artificial intelligence (AI) is empowering leaders worldwide. Learn how AI can enhance your leadership and help your organization thrive.
What is AI leadership?
According to a 2024 Gallup poll, 93% of Fortune 500 chief human resource officers (CHROs) say they've started using artificial intelligence in their organizations. However, only 15% of U.S. employees say their company has laid out a clear strategy for how they plan on incorporating it into their business.
Adopting an AI leadership style can help close that disconnect. Being an AI-driven leader means not only integrating AI into your own workflow but also guiding your employees to enthusiastically do the same.
For example, generative AI can complete routine tasks, freeing up time for other work. It can also potentially improve or enhance your work, like editing written content or creating original images to make a presentation more impactful.
Social media analytics products powered by AI can evaluate and present insights on data from multiple sources, such as customer feedback across review sites and social media.
But to take advantage of AI's competitive edge, you and your team must learn how to use AI effectively. You may need to start with the fundamentals, or you could be ready to hone your skills using specific AI tools and products. Wherever you're at in your AI education journey, edX has the AI courses and programs you need.
Why learn AI online with edX?
Competitive advantage
Get skilled in AI to help your organization excel.
Variety of courses
Choose from hundreds of specialized, expert-led programs.
Great flexibility
Learn at your own speed with self-paced online courses and certificate programs.
How to incorporate AI into your leadership
Step 1: Learn the fundamentals of AI
The ways you can improve business practices with AI are vast, but you'll struggle to implement these tools properly if you're not knowledgeable in the fundamentals of AI.
The professional certificate in Generative AI for Everyone from IBM covers popular AI tools, including ChatGPT, IBM watsonx, and Hugging Face. The 5-part program includes courses on writing effective prompts, ethical concerns of AI, and how AI is transforming businesses.
The Oxford Artificial Intelligence Progamme is another professional certificate option that can help leaders learn the essentials of AI and successfully incorporate it into their organizations.
Once you understand how AI works and its capabilities, you can begin to think of how it can benefit your business.
Step 2: Study AI for business
Artificial intelligence can streamline decision-making, automate routine tasks, and help you evaluate and improve employee satisfaction, among other possibilities. However, it also has its limitations. There are privacy and security concerns at play too.
Research or take courses on AI in a business context. This can help you brainstorm how to integrate AI into your operation while avoiding inherent risks (e.g., algorithm bias) and maintaining optimum data privacy.
Consider the following executive education programs from edX to get started:
- Making AI Work: Machine Intelligence for Business and Society by MITx
- Artificial Intelligence: Implications for Business Strategy by MIT Sloan School of Management
Step 3: Evaluate how AI can help
Businesses use AI to solve problems, increase productivity, automate routine tasks, and improve cybersecurity, but these aren't its only uses. Below are some other areas where AI can help.
Data analysis
Machine-learning platforms can be used to gather and analyze data, which you can use to improve processes.
For example, if you have an extensive inventory of products, a tool like AnswerRocket can analyze your sales and inventory data to identify low stock levels, suggest products that could be discontinued, and point out top sellers.
Customer support
Chatbots that use natural language processing can become your go-to customer service representative. A popular tool in this category is ChatBot, which can be programmed to answer questions specific to your organization and easily send any unresolved cases directly to a live agent.
Writing assistance
Generative AI writing tools can write social media captions, improve your marketing copy with editing suggestions, and compose blog posts for your website, among other tasks. It can even scan writing for potential plagiarism. Grammarly offers several subscription levels so you can choose which features fit your organization best.
Starting small with AI implementation may make the transition easier. Keep this in mind when developing your plans.
Step 4: Inspire your team to embrace AI
Gather your team for a meeting about AI implementation. Before you do this, however, you should consider:
- How will you educate your team about AI? Consider online courses and training programs.
- What is your timeline for implementing AI into daily workflow?
- Your employees may have concerns about being replaced by AI. How will you address this?
- What kind of oversight will be implemented to ensure AI is working effectively?
Step 5: Evaluate AI use regularly
Implementing AI into your business is a long-term commitment. When assessing the use of AI in your company, consider the following areas:
- Data security and privacy
- Cost vs. benefit
- Machine learning/algorithm bias
- Employee satisfaction around AI use
- New developments in AI
Find programs that meet your professional development goals
Take the first step in becoming an AI-driven leader. Explore artificial intelligence programs and courses on edX and get started today.