It was mid-April 2026. 30 of the world’s most senior talent leaders are sitting around tables, in a sunlit conference room in Rome. I’ve just asked them to place themselves and their organizations along an artificial intelligence (AI) maturity curve. I’m met with whispered remarks and chatter. No leader placed themselves at “Differentiating” — that is, seizing AI’s potential at the level of leadership and development infrastructure.

I asked this question in similar rooms in Sydney, Singapore and New York, and each time was met with 0 leaders identifying at “Differentiating.” So, what does this tell us?

AI may be the technology story of the decade. But whether it makes humans better and makes organizations perform better is, ultimately, a leadership story. And learning and development (L&D) has a huge part to play in writing that story.

The AI Maturity Curve: Where Most Organizations Fall

What I found from conversations with clients over the past 12 months is that organizations, even frontier firms, find themselves at similar stages of AI maturity. Most organizations have mastered “Experimenting,” which looks like individual productivity gains and pockets of excellence, but learnings stay local. “Integrating” is where organizations see shared norms emerging and where AI becomes part of day-to-day work, yet consistency varies. Many frontier firms shared examples of “Embedding,” where human and AI work become synchronized, silos break down and insights travel. “Differentiating” happens when AI-driven productivity is fully commoditized across the organization.

Most organizations I work with are stuck at stages one and two because their organizational structures were designed for a different distribution of work. A major culprit is that we are still defining who owns the AI agenda. Should it be information technology (IT), strategy or operations? The absence of a clear answer creates a unique opportunity for L&D. There has never been a better moment for L&D to own AI strategy, because this requires behavior change, and it requires your people to champion it.

The Real Shift Is Behavioral

Behavioral change sounds simple in theory. What often works is a focus on concrete skills, and this is where L&D has a real opportunity. As both a function and an industry, we’ve spent decades identifying and building skills. My team’s research identifies four human differentiators that separate organizations moving forward from those that stall.

1. Curiosity, moving from AI-facilitated task execution to asking what work should look like with AI integrated from the start. Curiosity requires asking better questions on how, why, when and where AI should come in. L&D can help enable this through a culture of curiosity where there is psychological safety and structured experimentation.
2. Discernment, the ability to interrogate AI outputs, but also determine relevant use cases. This might feel self-explanatory to some, but KPMG research found that 66% of employees regularly rely on AI outputs without evaluating accuracy. This is a judgement call that can be developed.
3. Humility, relinquishing the idea that leaders need to hold all the answers. Consider: When intelligence is widely shared, what does that mean for credibility and expertise? L&D can create space for leaders to navigate this out loud, safely.
4. Connection, ensuring individual AI gains travel across teams. This prevents “productivity islands” and silos of individual success and turns individual into organizational standards. These practices are trainable.

AI Transformation Starts With Developing Leaders

Building AI-ready leaders is fundamentally a coaching and leadership development challenge. Successful AI adoption requires leaders to develop new capabilities, whether that’s strengthening core leadership traits, building new skills or learning how to navigate an increasingly complex workplace where humans and AI work side by side. Recently, I’ve been asked where leaders should turn for this development, who is best positioned to provide it and whether AI itself can play that role. Those questions have prompted me to reflect on the unique value of human coaching in an AI-enabled world.

AI coaching can support behavior change, and true transformation is relational, not just informational. We saw this in our study: Human coaching outperformed AI coaching on deeper behavior change, difficult conversations and leadership confidence. What stood out most was a 13% increase in one’s ability to lead change with human coaching, versus AI coaching, lagging at only a 6% shift.

Paired together, AI and human coaching create something neither can do alone — offer support in the everyday and enable transformation in the moments that count. I see L&D being crucial in creating the conditions where that support is possible, across organizations and modeled by leaders visibly learning and experimenting; leaders who are showing others that it’s OK to sit in the messy middle.

The Opportunity for L&D to Develop AI-Ready Leaders

What does this look like in practice? Here are three clear steps to start developing AI-ready leaders in your organization who are equipped to drive transformation.

• Start by reframing the ownership question. If the AI agenda is still unclear, let L&D be responsible for owning it. That strategic shift acknowledges that AI adoption, use and maturity rely on the humans responsible for driving growth and performance.
• Build for behavior change instead of tool adoption. Audit which human capabilities are supporting adoption at scale. This could be low Connection or high Discernment. Once identified, plan from there.
• Make coaching the mechanism for change. Coaching is neither punitive nor reward based and is no longer exclusive to the C-suite. In an AI-augmented workforce, providing ongoing one-on-one development is how organizations ensure individual growth travels through teams, functions and organizational performance.

Back in that room in Rome, I started my keynote by asking: “When intelligence is a commodity to be shared, what does that leave for a leader who has built their career on knowing the answers?”

That question touches on something real for me and for many other leaders right now. In this new workplace of immediate and almost constant intelligence, we are asked to redefine credibility, identity and influence. L&D is uniquely positioned to help leaders work through this moment.