5 tips for leading digital transformation in the age of AI

Sep 29

5 min read

Cat with glowing pink eyes blasts rainbow laser beams against a purple background, mouth open in a dramatic meme-style pose.

Cat videos or AI doomsday videos? Be honest about which one you watched last.

Generative AI has been adopted faster than either the personal computer or the internet. By late 2024, 45% of US adults aged 18 to 64 were already using it, according to Bick, Blandin and Deming in Management Science (2026).

A leader I was coaching recently told me she’d stopped reading AI news because every headline made her strategy feel out of date by lunchtime. She's not alone. AI is reshaping digital transformation faster than most strategies can keep up, and even the leaders behind the most advanced models have publicly warned about the risks of what they are building.

So, where does that leave the rest of us with teams to lead on Monday morning? In my experience, the leaders who handle this well aren’t the most technical ones. They’re the ones who stay human.

Here are five practical ways to do that.

1. Put people ahead of the technology

2. Build empathy into how you lead

3. Drive consistent, two-way communication

4. Champion continuous learning and agility

5. Lead by example

Final thoughts on leading digital transformation

References

1. Put people ahead of the technology

AI may power digital transformation, but people decide whether it succeeds.

When I led digital transformation programmes, the people who mattered most weren’t always the ones with flashy job titles. It was the natural leaders others looked up to, the ones who challenged the status quo and were not afraid to speak truth to power. Once their concerns were taken seriously, they often became the strongest champions for change, because leadership had listened and not just mandated.

The best platform on the market will still gather dust if your team doesn’t understand why it’s there or how to make the best use of it.

So, start with the why, and be honest. Explain what’s changing and what it means for each person’s role. If some tasks will disappear, say so. Give people an opportunity to retrain. People can handle difficult news far better than silence, which they’ll fill with their own worst-case version.

Pairing people up helps too. In a 2025 study of more than 5,000 support agents, AI gave the biggest boost to less experienced staff. Quick adopters can teach others the tools, while experienced colleagues bring the judgement to spot when the output doesn’t look right.

2. Build empathy into how you lead

According to a 2026 Mercer survey, 62% of employees think their leaders underestimate the emotional impact of AI.

That’s the gap empathy closes. Change lands differently on every person in your team, and empathy is how you find out where it’s landing. Emotional intelligence and leadership go hand in hand.

The good news is that empathy isn’t fixed. A 2016 meta-analysis of 18 randomised controlled trials found that empathy training works. It starts with self-awareness: noticing your own reactions well enough to read other people’s. That’s why we build self-awareness and emotional intelligence into our EMPOWER programme. If empathy doesn’t come naturally to you, it can still become a habit.

🤔 Reflective question: When did you last ask someone on your team what worries them about this change, and then actively listen to the answer?

3. Drive consistent, two-way communication

Don’t rely on a single, one-time announcement.

Regular updates keep everyone aligned with the vision and help build trust. Use several channels, such as town halls, email, short videos, team meetings and the intranet, so the message reaches everyone.

Then make it genuinely two-way. End every update with a question, and act visibly on at least one answer, so people can see that speaking up changes something.

You might feel you’re repeating yourself too much, but you're probably not. Repetition is how a message about change sticks, so don’t assume everyone absorbed it the first time. It feels inefficient, but it’s one of the most underrated habits in change management.

Then make feedback a habit. A 15-minute weekly drop-in or an anonymous feedback survey helps small problems surface early.

🤔 Reflective question: If someone on your team had to explain in one sentence why this change is happening, what would they say?

4. Champion continuous learning and agility

You’re not the only one figuring this out as you go.

New platforms and capabilities keep arriving, and the organisations that build continuous learning into how they work adapt faster than those that wait for a training day.

That includes learning where AI falls short. In a Harvard and BCG experiment with 758 consultants, AI made people faster and better on tasks within its capabilities, but on a task beyond them, those using it were 19 percentage points less likely to produce a correct solution. The uncomfortable part is that people rarely notice when they’ve crossed that line. Knowing where the line sits is a leadership skill, not a technical one, and you only find it by leading through the AI revolution yourself: testing the tools on your own work instead of delegating the learning.

So make it safe to try things. Run small experiments, share what didn’t work, and treat a wobbly first attempt as useful data. None of this works without psychological safety at work: punish one failed experiment, and people will quietly stop trying. Then protect ten minutes at the end of each week for reflection on what you learned, or the lesson will have evaporated by Monday.

🤔 Reflective question: How often do you share your learnings through failure in front of your team?

5. Lead by example

As a leader, you're constantly being observed.

From the minute you walk in on Monday, people notice your mood and how you talk about the change. It's ok to be negative sometimes, as this stuff is hard, but you also need to galvanise people to navigate change in tough times. Show your commitment by taking part in the process, and let your team see that you don’t have all the answers and are learning too.

This holds for AI as much as anything else. McKinsey’s 2026 survey found that organisations getting real value from AI were twice as likely as others to say their senior leaders demonstrate commitment to it.

🤔 Reflective question: If your team mimicked your attitude to driving the transformation this week, would you be happy with what you saw?

Final thoughts on leading digital transformation

There’s no one-size-fits-all approach to digital transformation. These tips are a starting point, and the real work is tailoring them to your organisation’s context and culture. Start with one this week, ideally whichever feels most uncomfortable, because that’s usually the one your team needs most.