When Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, Arsen Tomsky faced a choice that no algorithm could make for him. His company, inDrive — now a tech unicorn worth $1.23 billion — was losing employees to military conscription, as noted in Tomsky’s book, “Inner Drive: From Underdog to Global Company.”

Many companies talk about “being a family,” but Tomsky showed what being a human leader is really about. InDrive relocated 1,000 employees from Russia to Kazakhstan and Cyprus.

This would not be an easy task in times of peace, let alone during a war — not to mention the costs involved.

He did it anyway.

Tomsky later told me that his decision came not from his business strategy but from years of deliberate inner work: developing self-awareness, emotional regulation, and value alignment until he had the clarity and courage to act on principle under impossible pressure. The external success of inDrive, he argued, was the direct result of that internal development.

This story illustrates human leadership. Artificial intelligence (AI) can amplify leadership, but multiplying something by zero still yields zero.

The Gap AI Is Exposing

McKinsey’s 2025 workplace research is unambiguous: The biggest barrier to successful AI adoption is not infrastructure or investment, it’s leadership. AI has not created this gap so much as made it visible in ways that can no longer be ignored.

A lack of human leadership directly impacts employee engagement. Gallup’s 2025 “State of the Global Workplace” report found that global employee engagement fell to 21% in 2024, matching its lowest point since the COVID-19 lockdowns. The drop was driven not by disengaged frontline workers, but by a collapse in manager engagement. Gallup estimates the cost at $438 billion in lost productivity in a single year.

Many organizations view AI adoption as the “secret sauce” for increased productivity, but despite three-quarters of employees using some form of AI tool, the gains have not materialized. This is not because the tools are inadequate, but because the humans deploying them lack the self-awareness, adaptive capacity and leadership confidence to use them effectively.

What AI Cannot Replicate

Effective human leadership requires creativity, contextual reasoning and ethical judgment, capabilities that no algorithm can fully replicate.

The data confirms what experienced leaders already know. Consider Kevin Gaskell, who inherited the leadership role of Porsche UK when the company was losing money. Customers were walking away, and dealers had three years of unsold inventory gathering dust, so the Porsche family fired the entire board.

Kevin told me that he and his colleague, the chief financial officer, were called to a meeting with the owners. Kevin could have played it safe to keep his job, but he turned to his colleague and said, “We’ll probably get fired. We might as well tell them what we think.”

That act of courageous honesty, choosing human principle over self-protection, transformed Kevin from an operations manager into a CEO at 32. He turned the Porsche UK business around, and five years later, BMW hired him to lead its UK operations. The crisis he didn’t create became the catalyst that revealed his potential.

Self-leadership, intentionally influencing our thinking, feeling and actions, toward our objectives, is the foundation of human leadership, and in the age of AI, it’s more important than ever.

Creating the Right Conditions

Autonom, a car leasing company in Romania, made a decision that would have seemed unusual to most executives. Every employee, regardless of level or role, was required to read one book per month. Not the same book, and not business books selected by management — any book the employee chose.

The company provided the books. The only requirement was to learn something new each month.

In a conversation with organizational culture expert Magor Csibi, who worked closely with the company, described to me what happened next: “The whole idea is that we are not reading the same business books. The diversity of all those ideas is generating a lot of new approaches, a lot of new procedures, a lot of new ideas.”

The results were not marginal. The company grew from a regional player into a dominant force in Romania’s leasing and car rental market. But the most revealing moment came when Csibi was visiting one of their provincial offices, having lunch with a senior executive, when a worker from the car wash operation approached their table. “Can I tell you what book I’m reading right now? And how I apply it in my everyday work?”

This was not a staged encounter. It was the natural result of a culture where learning had become everyone’s business. Most of the company’s senior leaders had been promoted from the first level of the organization. Top candidates were also actively seeking them out, joining the company because they knew they would learn quickly.

The IGNITE Framework

Are we measuring the right things?

Are we creating an environment for people to unlock their human potential?

These questions are at the heart of the IGNITE framework: The support system for addressing the human leadership gap. I is for inspire, creating the self-leadership story. G is for guide, asking the right questions. N is for nurture, creating a “Goldilocks’ Zone” with the correct balance between challenge and psychological safety. I is for integrate, which means human + AI. T is for transform, which is overcoming adversity to deliver performance. And E is for evaluate, which is using feedback to constantly improve.

3 Priorities for L&D

AI adoption has outpaced human readiness, but training and development professionals are well-positioned to respond.

Tim Gallwey, from his experience as a tennis coach, identified the formula:

“Performance equals potential minus interference,” outlined in his book, “The Inner Game of Tennis: The Classic Guide to Peak Performance.”

When leaders reduce the mental static that well-meaning pressure creates, natural capability emerges. The goal isn’t to pile on more training; often, it’s about removing the interference that’s already holding potential back.

Here are a few tips that can help:

• Build self-leadership capability: The manager crisis outlined in the Gallup data is, at its core, a self-leadership deficit. Managers under pressure who lack self-awareness and values-based decision-making become the interference that blocks their teams. Gallup’s research shows that providing basic management training can cut active manager disengagement in half, and that pairing training with ongoing coaching raises manager wellbeing. Tomsky and Gaskell did not lead well because of their titles but because of their inner development. Self-leadership should be a requirement at every level.
• Design for Learning Velocity. Research shows that 75% of organizations have rated their leadership development programs as “not very effective,” and only 18% said their leaders are “very effective” at achieving business goals. Learning designs that incorporate peer accountability, applied practice within real workflows, and psychological safety for experimentation produce the kind of behavioral change that survives the pressures of an AI-disrupted workplace.
• Focus on Developing Humans. Deloitte’s 2025 Human Capital Trends data finds that organizations investing in workforce development are 1.8 times more likely to report better financial results, making a strong case for developing people. But what should that development look like? The evidence points to one conclusion: L&D professionals should focus on developing human leadership skills that AI can amplify, rather than replace.

The Opportunity Is Real

Ultimately, the organizations that will thrive in the AI era are those who have invested in developing what makes their people irreplaceably human.

25 years of working with leaders across 40 countries has taught one consistent lesson — human potential, properly developed, outlasts every technology disruption. The AI era is no different.