As AI accelerates transformation, the expectations placed on tech leaders are evolving rapidly. Beyond technical mastery, they must now inspire, influence and innovate across every layer of the organisation. Five industry experts reflect on what leadership in tech means today and how it must continue to evolve.
We call leadership skills ‘soft’ skills, but they’re often the hardest to learn and teach. Computers do exactly what you tell them to, but people are much harder.
I was really lucky. I spent the first 10 years of my career at Procter & Gamble in a great leadership environment. One of the things they taught us was that, as technologists, we tend to try to convince everybody with logic, but that’s not always the best way to influence. A hard lesson many CIOs and CTOs are learning now is that a rational, logical explanation isn’t enough for everyone. You need to paint a picture of the future. You have to work on finding a middle ground and building negotiating skills, which many tech leaders haven’t necessarily picked up along the way.
There isn’t enough support for tech leaders. Realistically, you’re asked to be 90% a leader and 10% a technologist, so you’re not coding every day or getting hands-on with the latest tools. I don’t have the luxury of experimenting with technology during the day, which means learning has to happen outside of hours.
We need to help people get to grips with what’s really possible. It’s also important to create a safe environment to experiment and fail. Failure shouldn’t mean abandoning the entire idea.
We’re a product company, but innovation is close to our heart. When we look at AI, there’s no shortage of enthusiasm or ideas. A big part of the tech leader’s role is to provide clarity and direction because we can’t do everything. How do we help the organisation prioritise? How do we show results and consistency? Providing confidence in that process is key to us, both to drive acceptance but also for everyone to understand and help prioritise the right areas.
The tech leader doesn’t have to be the expert on everything. There must be trust in the organisation, and the tech leader can help realise the value and guide people.
To build a culture of innovation, showcasing wins is really important. Speed is also key. Finding early use cases, proving their effectiveness and value, and then moving quickly to the next is crucial to showing AI’s real impact.
The key thing for a CIO or a CTO is they’re not just a technology leader. They have to be part of the business leadership team. And that has been true for a long time.
When you look at the levels of investment in AI solutions, there’s a magnifying glass on it like never before. So the CIO or CTO needs to be very tightly integrated into the overall business strategy, and understand how these tools and capabilities can solve the biggest problems for the organisation.
Tech leaders have to be able to roll a technology strategy out to the organisation and provide the context, not just on what the team needs to do, but why they’re doing it and how that’s helping them achieve their strategic goals. So it puts an increased onus on the tech leader to work from the upstream, big-picture strategy, through to the deployment across the organisation. It’s no easy task.
The most important way to win people over is to demonstrate wins. And they don’t have to be big wins right out of the gate. They can be small wins, but they have to be able to show their employees and their teams that this technology can deliver on what it promised. They need to get them excited about using it, as opposed to thinking about it as something that is a threat to their jobs.
It’s interesting how the demographics of responsibility are shifting. If you look at which generation is driving generative AI adoption, it’s not at the top end, it’s generation Z. The traditional CIO is just not prepared for this. And what we’ve seen work really well is reverse mentoring and using the power of the younger generations to help further develop those established leaders.
The job is evolving from a functional leader to being an empowerer of human capital. And that is a huge shift in the role of the technology leader. They now have to consider how people think and behave.
There are quite a lot of old skills coming back again now that are really useful when implementing AI projects, which need many different functional streams all collaborating. Compromise is the big word when it comes to successfully launching an AI project.
It’s an interesting personal development challenge. We work with a lot of fellows who are global leaders in the field, and the work they do is truly inspirational. Hands down, what sets them apart from a good data scientist or a good machine learning engineer is their ability to mobilise other people to their cause. For young professionals, my advice would be to take this very seriously when you’re getting started.
We also see tech leaders honing some of these soft skills in other areas, for example, by publishing industry-based research or working on social impact projects. They build skills outside of the business, and then they come back with far more to add to the company. And if we could capture that in essence, I think that would really help people to move forwards.
It’s also a profoundly unhelpful stereotype that you’re either a tech person or you’re a business person. In reality, most of us are a little bit of both. I certainly see plenty of people who are masters of both.
As AI accelerates transformation, the expectations placed on tech leaders are evolving rapidly. Beyond technical mastery, they must now inspire, influence and innovate across every layer of the organisation. Five industry experts reflect on what leadership in tech means today and how it must continue to evolve.
We call leadership skills ‘soft’ skills, but they're often the hardest to learn and teach. Computers do exactly what you tell them to, but people are much harder.
I was really lucky. I spent the first 10 years of my career at Procter & Gamble in a great leadership environment. One of the things they taught us was that, as technologists, we tend to try to convince everybody with logic, but that's not always the best way to influence. A hard lesson many CIOs and CTOs are learning now is that a rational, logical explanation isn’t enough for everyone. You need to paint a picture of the future. You have to work on finding a middle ground and building negotiating skills, which many tech leaders haven’t necessarily picked up along the way.
