Everyone Expects Leaders to Use AI for the Big Decisions. Almost Nobody Thinks They're Ready

Just over half of organisations now expect their leaders to make greater use of AI in strategic decision-making. That's Harvard Business Impact's 2026 Global Leadership Study. A separate Gartner survey this year found only 8% of HR leaders believe their managers currently have the skills to use AI effectively in that role. Do the subtraction and you get a 45 point gap between what's expected and what's actually there.

The obvious response is more AI training, another workshop on the tools everyone's already half using. I think that's the wrong read, and it's worth saying why rather than just asserting it.

AI hasn't just added a tool to a leader's day. It's increased the volume of decisions coming at them and removed a lot of the natural pauses that used to sit between one decision and the next. A leader who's genuinely fluent in the tools is still making more calls, faster, with less recovery time built in anywhere. You can train someone on prompting for a year and the volume problem stays exactly where it was.

This is what I call Decision Debt. It's the gap between how many decisions a leader is now expected to make and how much cognitive recovery they're actually getting between them, and it compounds quietly. Nobody notices the first few decisions made on depleted judgement. By the twentieth, the pattern's already set, and it usually shows up as a leader going safer and slower rather than making an obvious mistake anyone would flag.

In addition to being a leadership mental performance speaker, I'm also a mental performance coach to professional triathletes, and the closest parallel I know to this is pacing. A triathlete doesn't fail a race because they can't run, bike or swim. They fail it because they made their pacing decisions for the first hour and never adjusted for the fact that decision six needs to be made on a completely different physiological state than decision one. Volume changes the conditions the decision gets made under. Skill alone doesn't account for that shift, and neither does AI fluency.

So the 45 point gap isn't really telling you your leaders don't understand AI. It's telling you nobody's built the capacity to hold decision quality steady as AI pushes the volume up. That's a different thing to fix, and it's not something a tools workshop was ever going to reach.

If your organisation is one of the 53% expecting more from leaders on AI-driven decisions, the question worth asking isn't whether they know the tools. It's whether they can still make decision forty as well as decision one.

Neil Edge is a Leadership Mental Performance Speaker. He speaks to senior and emerging leaders about building the mental architecture required to protect decision quality and maintain high performance when pressure, adversity, and AI-driven demand are constant. To find out more or discuss bringing this into your organisation, contact neil@neiledgespeaks.com

I go further into what continuous AI-driven decision volume actually does to leaders in AI Takes the Easy Decisions Off Your Leaders.