Introduction: Leadership with AI

All courses / AI Leader / Module 1 / Chapter 1

Learning objectives

After the lesson the participant can:

• Explain the three reasons the book gives for treating leadership with AI as a subject of its own.
• State the five parts of the working thesis and what evidence would show it wrong.
• Classify a leader's AI use by usage mode and by degree of delegation.
• Draft an inventory of where AI already takes part in one leader's work.

Key concepts

The working thesis

Five claims the book tests: leadership is transformed and not abolished; delegation is graded and has a ceiling; the span grows and the middle layer is redesigned, not deleted; AI may inform, draft, prepare and execute within a mandate but may not answer; and adoption, productivity and capability are claims that need evidence.

Usage modes

The six modes taken from AI Governance, Chapter 2, from Mode 0 Ambient AI to Mode 5 Autonomous production agents. They classify AI by how its output reaches a person and what it can do, because the way a model is used matters more than which model it is.

Degrees of delegation

The five autonomy levels, Level 0 Advisory to Level 4 Autonomous, applied per leadership decision class. The level is decided and recorded, not discovered: a leader who learns afterwards that a system acted at Level 2 has not delegated but has been bypassed.

The inside-or-outside shape of AI performance

In the field experiment with 758 consultants, those with AI did better on 18 tasks within the model's capability and were 19 percentage points less likely to be correct on a task outside it. The finding that carries over is the shape, not the size of the effect.

Observable, expected, speculation

The three labels, defined in AI Governance, Chapter 22, that every statement about the future carries: happening now and documented, supported by a stated trend or decided instrument, or plausible but unevidenced. The author's own projections appear only in Chapters 29 and 33.

Interactive exercises

Do them here and get feedback at once. Choose a card and then where it belongs, or drag it.

Teaching plan

Discussion

1. In the Nordvik case the error was corrected before the vote. What exactly remained unrepaired, and why does the book treat that as the more serious finding?
2. Which part of your own leadership work consists of collecting, condensing and relaying information, and what would remain of the role if that part became cheap?
3. The law names management bodies and natural persons but says little about the records that would make their duties real. What records would your organisation need to show who answered for a decision AI helped to prepare?

Written exercise

Self-test

Choose an answer to see whether it is right, or open the answer below each question.

1. What did Nordvik Region's record of the April 2029 briefing incident show that the timely correction of the figure did not repair?

   1. That the council had already voted on the wrong waiting-time figure
   2. That nobody could say whether the error came from the staff assistant or from its source
   3. That the staff assistant had been operating at Level 3 Bounded without a written policy or a stop
   4. That the unit manager who noticed the error had no right to read the paper
   Show the answer

   B. That nobody could say whether the error came from the staff assistant or from its source
   The council voted on the correct figure, but the record LDR-NR-2029-0003 shows that no one could reconstruct the origin of the error, so the regional director could not say who answers for a decision the assistant helped to prepare.

2. According to the chapter, which finding of the field experiment with 758 consultants carries over to leaders?

   1. That AI raises the number of completed tasks by 12.2 per cent in most professions
   2. That consultants with a prompt-engineering overview always outperform those without
   3. That performance depends on whether a task is inside or outside what the system does well, and users cannot always tell
   4. That leaders gain less from AI than individual contributors because their work is spoken
   Show the answer

   C. That performance depends on whether a task is inside or outside what the system does well, and users cannot always tell
   The chapter stresses the limits of the study, a single firm, consultants and a 2023 model, and takes from it a shape and not a size of effect: results depend on whether the task lies within the system's capability.

3. Which statement about Level 3 Bounded does the chapter make?

   1. Without a written policy enforced outside the model and a stop held by the leader, it is Level 4 in practice
   2. It requires the leader to approve each individual action explicitly before the system executes it, as at Level 2
   3. It is the level at which leaders in both organisations use their own assistants
   4. It may be used for any decision class once the system has run for a year
   Show the answer

   A. Without a written policy enforced outside the model and a stop held by the leader, it is Level 4 in practice
   The line between Level 2 and Level 3 is where per-action approval stops. Level 3 depends on a codified policy enforced outside the model and a stop the leader holds; without them it is Level 4 in practice.