Reading Harvard Business Impact’s 2026 Global Leadership Study, what stuck with me wasn’t the scale of AI adoption; it was the leadership mindset and investment priorities behind successful adoption.
Half of leaders are good at piloting AI. Piloting is the easy part. But only 38% have actually embedded AI into how the business operates through an AI + human operating model. And just 31% of organisations are helping people build trust in AI and adopt it. Behind that gap are employees quietly worried about their jobs, or simply not using the tools because no one has explained why they matter.
Here’s what I found most interesting. Leaders who paired strategic thinking with execution reported a 52% stronger impact on innovation. Leaders deploying the same AI without that combination saw just 39%. Same technology. Different outcomes.
That pattern shows up elsewhere in the study too. 45% of leaders now rank emotional intelligence as the most important leadership capability for the year ahead, followed by agility and resilience, purely human skills. Strategic thinking and decision-making ranked much lower at 30%.
That makes sense. AI can analyse vast amounts of information and even recommend decisions. Leaders still need to read a room, hold a team steady through uncertainty, build trust and know when to challenge the answer AI has just generated.
So if leadership mindset is the real differentiator, you’d expect the greatest investment to go towards the leaders who shape that mindset every day: the senior and middle layers responsible for developing strategy, translating it into execution and helping people navigate change. Yet that isn’t where the greatest increase in investment is going.
Instead, frontline leaders are receiving the biggest increase in development investment. Senior and middle leaders, the people carrying teams through the disruption, are receiving the least.
That’s the disconnect. Organisations are investing heavily in AI deployment while hoping leadership capability catches up. Yet the findings point to the importance of leadership development leading the transformation, rather than following it.
The pursuit of productivity needs to include greater investment in the people who have to lead the change, equipping them with the human skills they need to build trust and move adoption forward.
The companies getting the greatest value from AI will be the ones investing in the leaders who help people make sense of it. Right now, it seems many aren’t investing where it counts.