By David Rock
As AI continues its steady march into workplaces, leaders are seeing mixed results in terms of productivity and effectiveness. According to an MIT study released earlier this year of business leaders and employees, only 5% of initiatives had seen a financial return at an organizational level. The remaining 95% reported no such positive impact.
Meanwhile, millions of users find value every day in using AI to accelerate their administrative tasks, brainstorm creative projects, and gut-check big decisions. This fracturing of experiences is playing out beyond AI usage as well, as organizations figure out how to weave the new technology into performance management, leadership development, and other processes.
How will the adoption of AI and adjacent priorities evolve in the coming year? Here are five leadership trends to watch in 2026.
AI FLUENCY BECOMES A NECESSITY
Our research shows that AI users tend to fall into one of four categories in how they use AI to support their work: the resistors, the ambivalent, general users, and the AI fluent. Between the resistors and the general users, increased AI use creates a range of outcomes. For instance, several studies have found a dulling effect when people use AI to supply answers, rather than explore possibilities or deepen the user’s thinking.
But something seems to happen in the leap from general usage to AI fluency—that is, when they recruit AI to support their own thinking, rather than treat it as a souped-up search engine. In these cases, people get smarter. And not just a little smarter, but a lot smarter. Every leader should be thinking about crossing this crucial threshold: gauging where employees currently stand and developing systems to get workers smarter, faster, not simply hoping AI will get the right results on its own.
PERFORMANCE MANAGEMENT GETS OVERHAULED
A decade ago, I called on leaders to kill their performance ratings. Now we see another shift taking place: the migration to AI-assisted performance management to reduce and perhaps even eliminate the overwhelming presence of bias.
Talent teams rely on outdated systems and software to measure employees’ performance. We hear over and over how fed up they are, and how they’re searching for something better. We believe the right tools for gauging performance, setting goals, and tracking results over time are AI partners that can look at team members’ output, coach the employee individually, and support accurate data collection.
We should not be surprised if leaders, especially in large firms, begin adopting these tools in the coming year to reduce human error and free up time for leaders to tend to other talent issues. We believe in this trend so strongly, we created an AI leadership coach named NILES to support talent teams in this exact position.
EVERY LEADER LEARNS TO BE AGILE
In 2025, we highlighted the trend of accelerating change—organizations weren’t just experiencing change; it was beginning to happen faster and faster. We are now seeing the next step in that process, as leaders continue to build the habits of agility within their teams.
This goes beyond the rise of growth mindset from several years ago. Agility in the age of AI requires a suite of skills, including but limited to: resilience, change management, and the ongoing management of expectations in the face of long-term uncertainty. We predict this trend will happen almost by necessity. The leaders who adapt to the rapid pace of change will thrive in 2026 and beyond; those who are unwilling to slip into the new flow of work will feel the resistance of old habits fighting a complex new environment.
AI AMPLIFIES LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT
According to our research, setting a foundation of AI fluency among the leadership ranks opens the door for much faster development of those leaders—and it’s an effect we expect organizations to discover rather quickly. The logic goes like this: The more a leader can learn about their role and responsibilities through an AI partner, the deeper their thinking will be and the higher-quality conversations they can have with direct reports.
This is what it means to develop a leader in the age of AI. Rather than attending seminars where leaders learn a few buzzwords and are told the mandate “This is how things are done around here,” they will begin working with AI coaches who help them ask better questions to solve problems and arrive at their own insights, which research shows are among the strongest sources of motivation we humans experience.
WELLBEING RE-ENTERS THE PERFORMANCE CONVERSATION
Data from Glassdoor earlier this year showed burnout rates hit a 10-year high in 2025, with mentions of “burnout” increasing 32% year over year since 2024. Our work with clients paints the same picture: Employees, leaders in particular, are feeling overwhelmed by the constant change and top-down calls to embrace AI, even if team members may use the technology in their personal lives.
Our own research has found that a sense of autonomy and fairness have become top priorities for employees, replacing needs for certainty and relatedness (or a desire for belonging) that loomed largest in our last analysis, back in 2012. This shift suggests people are feeling pressured and confined from the top, and perhaps overwhelmed with injustices around the world. We predict employees will make their needs known to leadership, forcing a reckoning among top brass to take well-being seriously as a prerequisite for high performance.
The takeaway: Even as AI continues to creep its way into organizational life, the human-to-human connection remains as vital as ever for creating high-achieving organizations.
