What are the fundamental leadership capabilities that are needed for an era of exponential technology and AI innovation?

Team and organizational design, change leadership

Focus on psychological safety, and pay more attention to inputs than outputs.

Making clear that there is a psychological safety and space for your team to generate ideas, express their thoughts, views, regardless of how radical and crazy their ideas are, without being judged. This is a must-have capability! 

Based on Gartner's perspective, leaders in the era of exponential AI must shift from traditional management to a more human-centric approach. The essential capabilities are:

• Adaptability & Agility: Rapidly learning and pivoting in response to constant technological disruption.

• Emotional Intelligence (EQ): Leading with empathy, building trust, and managing the human side of AI integration.

• Strategic Vision: Moving beyond incremental improvements to envision and articulate transformative business models.

• Ethical Stewardship: Ensuring responsible and transparent use of AI, and navigating its societal impact.

This is a wonderful time to be a CIO, given the unprecedented flurry of past pace technology evolution and innovation with AI. Tech leaders have always had to be 'futurists' but the horizon for the future is much nearer, requiring to be able to maximize innovation through a shorter lifecycle. This rapid evolution of technology will also over time start to change traditional business models. So, leaders will need fluency in adapting business models to compete with disruptors.