Why AI Demands a New Kind of Leadership

Good leaders know they can’t always predict the future.
Great leaders know they don’t have to.

I’ve spent my career building and backing ideas that seemed impossible at the time. From the early days of Shazam, before smartphones even existed, to investing in founders who are now shaping the frontier of AI, one pattern keeps emerging: the world doesn’t stand still. And neither can leadership.

Right now, the pace of change is unlike anything we’ve seen before. Artificial intelligence is accelerating innovation and it’s rewiring how businesses operate, how teams think, and what people expect from their leaders. At this moment, it’s not just companies that need to adapt. It’s leadership itself.

While leadership today demands flexibility, sometimes even improvisation, there are still a few principles that can help us lead more effectively through change.

1. The Old Playbook Is Too Slow

There was a time when leadership meant control. Tight plans. Clear chains of command. Five-year strategies written in stone. That kind of thinking might have worked in a more predictable world. But AI moves differently. It doesn’t follow the rules, it writes new ones as it goes.

If you’re still leading with certainty, you’re already behind.

The companies I meet today, whether they’re building AI-powered decision tools or platforms that allow anyone to create with large language models, are teaching me the same thing over and over again: adaptability beats perfection. The goal isn’t to know everything in advance. It’s to build teams and systems that can learn fast, flex when needed, and respond to change in real time.

I remember speaking with the founder of Dust, whose team is helping companies build their own internal AI tools with remarkable speed. What stood out wasn’t just the product; it was how openly the founder talked about uncertainty. There was no bravado, just clarity: “We don’t need to be right at launch. We just need to get better every week.” That mindset? That’s leadership in 2025.

2. Ask Better Questions

Just a few days ago, I met an entrepreneur, Noamaan, who built a fully electric truck now used by Amazon in the UK. Noamaan didn’t have a background in automotive engineering. He was drafting a clean air policy. But when traditional truck makers dragged their heels, he borrowed money from his dad, teamed up with his brother, and got to work.

When I asked him why he did it, his answer was simple: “Because everyone else said it was too hard.”

That’s the leadership shift we’re seeing. It’s not about having the answer. It’s about asking better questions. Not “Is it possible?” but “What would it take?”

And in the AI era, asking the right question is more powerful than ever. Machine learning models thrive on clear objectives and good data. So do teams. Your job as a leader isn’t to micromanage the how. It’s to create a culture where people can figure it out, with speed, trust, and enough safety to take a risk.

3. Clarity in Chaos

If there’s one thing I learned from building Shazam, it’s that chaos is inevitable. The team changed, the business model changed, the tech landscape shifted underneath our feet. But what held us together was a clear sense of purpose.

People often ask me what the “secret” to Shazam’s success was. I don’t have a simple answer. It wasn’t a silver bullet. It was 18 years of resilience, reinvention, and yes, moments of blind faith. But if I had to name three things, I’d say: a clear mission, an unreasonable amount of persistence, and a team that stuck together when it mattered most.

Also… we got lucky. (Every entrepreneur needs their Daft Punk moment.)

4. Let Go to Move Faster

I’m meeting more founders now who are letting go of the old leadership models. They’re building environments, not empires. They’re obsessed with feedback, not hierarchy. They’re less interested in being the smartest person in the room, and more focused on making everyone smarter.

At Liveblocks, the team is rethinking how people collaborate in real time. What I admire isn’t just the tech—it’s how they operate internally. Leadership there feels more like quiet orchestration than command-and-control. It’s about giving people space, removing friction, and trusting the process. No one’s trying to be the hero, they’re trying to build something great together.

Leadership used to be about directing traffic. Now it’s about designing the road.

The smartest AI systems don’t run because someone told them what to do. They run because someone set the right conditions. In a way, great leadership is becoming more like machine learning itself: set the reward function, define the boundaries, and let the team discover the best path.

It’s not easy to lead this way. It takes humility. And courage. But the results are extraordinary when you do.

5. The Human Edge

AI can write, code, automate, and optimise. But it can’t create belief. It can’t build culture. It can’t walk into a room and make a team feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. That’s still your job.

If you’re leading in a time like this, where the ground keeps shifting, where every week brings a new tool or threat or breakthrough, your people don’t just need you to make decisions. They need you to give meaning.

Because the art of adapting isn’t about knowing what’s next. It’s about building something that gets stronger when you don’t.

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