TLDR: IMD argues that artificial intelligence is already a teammate whether the leader chose it or not, so leading hybrid human-AI teams becomes a leadership problem, not a technology one, that rewires the leader’s own role.
The premise: AI joined the team without an invitation
The starting point of IMD’s programme Leading Teams in the AI Era is blunt: artificial intelligence (AI) — software that learns from data to generate content, draft analysis and suggest decisions — is already on the team whether the leader chose it or not. People across a team already use it at different speeds, with different tools, and at different levels of disclosure. Some lean on it heavily and say nothing; others avoid it; most sit somewhere in between. That unevenness, not the technology itself, is what a leader now has to manage. The programme’s central claim is that this is a leadership problem, not a technology one.
The leader’s role is being rewired
If AI sits inside the team’s daily work, the leader’s own role does not stay still. Some responsibilities lose relevance as machines absorb them; new ones emerge that did not exist before. IMD frames the leader’s first task as building a personal map of what to stop, what to start, and what to adapt — a deliberate audit of where a leader’s attention still adds value and where it has quietly stopped doing so.
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