Leslie Rohonczy, IMC™, PCC, Executive Coach, Leadership Expert, Speaker, Author
The bots are coming! The bots are coming!
Actually, they're already here, and they're forever changing the very fabric of how we work. But if you’ve been wondering whether Artificial Intelligence might someday replace your role as a leader, let's look at what leadership truly calls for in this new machine-learning era. AI may change how we work, but the beating heart of leadership remains profoundly human.
As AI continues to transform how businesses operate, streamlining workflows, crunching complex data, and making rapid decisions, it’s easy to imagine that our human value could be diminishing. But if leaders want to remain relevant, there's one area to double down on, where machines still can’t compete: emotional intelligence.
Hey, good news! It turns out, being human is your competitive advantage.
COLD DATA MEETS WARM MEANING
AI excels at what we might call 'cold data': facts, figures, patterns, research, and probabilities, all processed at a speed that boggles the mind. This ability to process vast amounts of information, find efficiencies, and surface insights is immensely valuable, especially where timely decisions matter.
But leadership decisions don’t happen in a vacuum
Leaders also rely on 'warm meaning': the emotionally rich, human context we pick up through connection with each other: tone, silence, body language, relationships, intuition, and trust. This isn’t abstract or fluffy woo-woo stuff; it’s grounded, perceptive intelligence.
Warm meaning is what tells you when your team is nearing burnout, when a conflict is quietly gaining momentum, or when someone’s underperformance is rooted in fear, not laziness. When leaders rely only on the available cold data, without tuning in to the emotional dynamics that shape behaviours, they're missing out on half of the critical information they could be using, the kind of information that doesn’t show up on a dashboard, but that shows up in people.
In leadership, 'warm meaning' is about how we connect, how we listen, and respond to the emotional reality around us. AI can inform you that productivity is dipping. But it won’t tell you that your top performer is quietly job-hunting after being passed over for a promotion.
High-impact leaders use both cold data to sharpen their decisions, and warm meaning to ensure they land in ways that inspire, motivate, align, and sustain.
In fact, it’s not just about what you know – it’s about how wisely and humanely you apply it. Future-ready leaders are experimenting with a new equation: AI + EI = ROI. But more on this in a minute
WHY AI ISN’T YOUR ENEMY
I've talked to many leaders about how AI is impacting their teams, and their roles. Some are excited by the possibilities and are willing to embrace it. Others are fearful that they'll become irrelevant, replaced by this technology altogether. While there's no way to predict exactly how the future will unfold, one thing is already clear: AI isn’t the enemy; it’s a powerful ally that, when used well, enhances decision-making, accelerates innovation, and frees up capacity for higher-value work.
According to McKinsey’s 2023 Global Survey, 55% of organisations have adopted AI in at least one function, up from 20% just five years ago. That number will keep rising. Today’s AI tools are being used to:
Predict customer behaviour with remarkable accuracy
Personalise employee learning and development pathways
Improve hiring processes with less bias (when designed properly)
Monitor operational performance
Optimise pricing strategies based on real-time market data
Identify emerging market trends ahead of competitors
Streamline back-office operations such as scheduling, forecasting, and logistics
Assist with regulatory compliance by flagging anomalies and generating audit trails
Provide frontline customer support through natural language chatbots and virtual assistants
Here’s the part that makes me hopeful, even excited, for the future: the World Economic Forum has identified emotional intelligence as one of the top 10 skills of the future. I'm excited about this because, as machines take over routine tasks, the human differentiators – empathy, influence, relationship-building, and self-awareness – become more valuable, not less.
THE EMOTIONAL INTELLIGENCE EDGE
High-performing leaders make people feel seen; they pause before reacting, ask the question no one else thought to ask (or was brave enough to ask). They’re the ones who can read the tension in a room without a word being spoken, who notice when someone’s holding back, and who can name what others are skirting around. That’s emotional intelligence in motion, and in the mad scramble to hire the best and brightest, corporate recruiters look for leaders with high EQ, which is quickly becoming the most powerful differentiator that can set you apart from the pack.
Daniel Goleman, who helped bring emotional intelligence into the leadership spotlight, found that nearly 90% of the difference between star performers and average ones comes down to EI – not technical expertise.
And in 2020, a study published in Frontiers in Psychology found that leaders with high emotional intelligence had teams with significantly higher performance, well-being, and engagement scores.
AI + EI: THE NEW LEADERSHIP BALANCE
The future of leadership isn’t about becoming more robotic. It’s about becoming more human. It’s about blending AI’s cold precision with your own warm presence. Here’s how:
1. Use AI to inform, not replace, your judgment. Let the data shape your understanding, but not override your wisdom. If AI says productivity is down, ask your team what’s going on before assuming laziness. Trust the numbers, but verify the narrative.
2. Lead with emotional context. When making decisions with AI input, add the layer that only you can: what’s the emotional temperature of your team? How will this land with them? What invisible variables might be in play?
3. Practice strategic empathy. Anticipate emotional responses and design your communication with care, especially during change, uncertainty, or conflict, to meet people where they are. Emotionally intelligent leaders don’t just feel for others; they act on that understanding.
4. Build human-centred cultures in tech-driven environments. AI doesn’t build culture, people do. Use your emotional intelligence to create environments where curiosity, learning, feedback, and collaboration flourish, even when bots are doing half the work.
5. Model emotional self-regulation. Leaders set the emotional tone. If you’re short-tempered or avoidant under pressure, your team will mirror that. Use self-awareness tools, mindfulness techniques, and coaching to manage your own triggers and stay grounded in tough moments.
One of my current coaching clients is a senior executive in the tech sector, with 7 regional teams in her span of control. She started using AI-powered dashboards to track team performance, and the data was clear: one region was underperforming. The 'cold data' conclusion? This was an under-performing team not focused on delivery. And the 'warm meaning' conclusion? She held skip-level one-on-one conversations with the Director, Team Leaders, and employees, and discovered that the region had lost two key members and was working overtime just to stay afloat. She shifted resources, offered her appreciation to the overwhelmed employees, put well-being supports in place, and helped reset expectations with upper management. Three months later, their performance surged, not because of the dashboard, but because of the human decisions that followed.
OUR HUMANITY WON'T BE AUTOMATED
So what does it actually look like when cold data and warm meaning work together in leadership? It comes down to a simple, but powerful formula: AI + EI = ROI: AI gives you insight, and EQ gives you impact.
It’s one thing to know what’s happening across your systems, teams, and markets. It’s another to understand how those changes are felt, absorbed, and responded to by real people. While AI can highlight performance dips or flag process gaps, it takes emotionally intelligent leadership to uncover the why behind them, to challenge limiting beliefs that are driving less-than-ideal behaviours, and to navigate the human side of change.
The return on investment in this equation isn’t just financial, although financial benefits are likely. ROI also shows up in stronger team engagement, faster adaptation to change, higher trust, better retention, and decisions that actually stick because people feel heard, involved, and supported. That’s the kind of return AI can’t fully generate on its own.
Some AI tools are getting better at mimicking empathy or providing grief support scripts. But let’s not confuse simulation with understanding. Leaders still need to build trust, gauge emotional undercurrents, and respond in the moment to subtle cues that aren’t captured in any dataset. That’s not soft; that’s high-performing leadership.
If you want to stay future-ready, don’t try to outthink the bots. They can’t lead people with wisdom, presence, and heart. But you can. And that becomes your leadership edge.