From good to great: Learning and leading in the age of AI

Learnings from Simployer

By Eilin Gillesen (CPO, Simployer), Signe Enemark Kildesgaard (Leadership Consultant), and Cecilie Bonde Christiansen (AI Transformation Consultant)

Artificial intelligence is transforming not just what we do, but how we learn, lead, and grow. For organizations that want to move from good to great in this new era, the shift moves beyond technology; It fundamentally shifts our cultures.

At Simployer, we set out to build an AI-ready culture grounded in curiosity, experimentation, and human-centric leadership. The goal was to help every employee gain confidence with AI, while equipping leaders to intentionally guide the transition into a new AI-future.

Learning AI: From isolated tools to shared capability

By early 2025, many employees at Simployer were already using AI in their daily work, particularly in software development. But we wanted to move beyond isolated use. We wanted to scale from individual tools to a shared capability.

We saw an opportunity to go from good to great, building on a solid foundation of experimentation and curiosity and embedding AI as a collective capability that supports our strategy, our delivery, and our culture.

Together with LUNAI Consulting and Enemark, we co-created a scalable, human-centric AI learning journey. Rather than deliver static training destined to be outdated in weeks, we embedded short, focused experiments into everyday work. Over 250 employees engaged in hands-on learning, from simple summarization tasks to advanced prototypes using RAG-enabled tools.

Learnings were shared in designated AI forums. Leaders and AI champions facilitated Q&As, sharing both successful and ‘failed’ experiments – ultimately role-modelling a culture of curiosity and continuous learning.

The impact showed in just 6 weeks. Daily AI usage jumped to 61% (+12pp), while the share of non-users dropped to just 1%. More importantly, the organization matured its AI literacy, confidence, and culture of experimentation.

As AI became a shared capability, we began to see something deeper unfolding – AI was not just changing our workflows, it was changing leadership itself.

Leading AI: Redefining what leadership means

Leaders are no longer just leading people. They are leading people, AI, and the space where the two intersect.

That shift raises profound questions, such as:

• What role should AI play in creative processes where empathy, diversity and vision are foundational?
• Who owns deliverables produced with AI assistance?
• How do we automate tasks without automating critical thinking and decision-making?

It is one leadership challenge to adopt AI into your organization. However, the biggest leadership challenge is managing the evolution of organizational capabilities in the right balance between people and AI; Understanding what to keep, what to grow and what to let go of.

For Simployer, this became the next critical step.

The capability shift: Balancing human and technological growth

In this new paradigm, leaders must intentionally navigate the evolution of human and technological capabilities, and the relationship between the two.

Figure 1 illustrates how organizational capabilities can and will shift over time as technology – in this case AI – is introduced in the ways of working.  This prompts new leadership responsibility, as human and technological capabilities evolve in parallel and partnership:

• Where do we want to build tech capabilities?
• Where are we willing to give up on human capabilities?
• Which human capabilities do we want to grow?

Figure 1, development of core capabilities. As technology is introduced into an organization, it will open possibilities for new capabilities. However, it will also take over some of the tasks and roles previously held by humans. While this needs to be managed consciously, it also opens possibilities for developing new skills in our people.  Stewarding the integration of AI while cultivating human skills are both part of the future leaders’ responsibility.

Research[1]  shows that employees who rely on AI for cognitive tasks may also be unlearning key skills. Excessive use of generative AI can reduce diversity of thought  and weaken recall, reasoning, and ownership. This makes deliberate investment in human capability development even more critical. For leader, this means deciding what skills can be transferred to AI, and which kept with people.

At the same time, demand for distinctly human capabilities is increasing. Research[2] from MIT Sloan frames these as EPOCH skills:

• Empathy & emotional intelligence: Understanding others and creating psychological safety in hybrid human-AI teams.
• Presence & connectedness: Maintaining attention and engagement in increasingly automated workflows.
• Opinion, judgment & ethics: Ensuring responsible decision-making in data-driven contexts.
• Creativity & imagination: Designing what AI cannot predict or reproduce.
• Hope, vision & leadership: Guiding people with purpose in times of rapid change.

While most would argue that the above are the skills that make us inherently human, they are often not in focus or undervalued in a corporate setting. Leading this capability shift requires more than just new awareness from leaders. It requires reinvesting time saved from AI-optimizations, rethinking how we hire, assess performance, and develop people.

Leading the shift: Building future-ready leadership

To navigate the capability shift, leaders must make intentional decisions about tasks, skills, roles, and development priorities. At Simployer, this thinking is coming to life through three simple leadership practices:

1. Decide what to automate consciously. Focus on automating tasks that free up time and energy without weakening strategic capabilities or learning.
2. Nurture human capabilities. Keep investing in the EPOCH skills as core strengths for leaders and teams.
3. Create reflective spaces. Use gatherings like Leadership Labs to pause, share experiences, and explore which capabilities to let go of-and which to strengthen.

Rather than a traditional leadership development program, the focus is on investing in leadership as an ongoing, collective practice. The aim is to help leaders grow their awareness and capability to balance performance, learning, and human connection in an increasingly digital world.

We believe that equipping leaders to lead AI is no longer optional. Just as organizations invest in leadership to develop people, they must now invest in leadership to intentionally guide technology adoption and its impact on human growth.

As most organizations face the next wave of AI adoption, this balance becomes the defining leadership imperative.

The leadership imperative: Leading AI, not being led by it

The real risk is not that AI will take over work. It is that, without conscious leadership, AI will reshape work in ways that erode critical skills for humans.

Technology will move fast regardless. Whether it amplifies human potential or replaces it in misaligned ways is a question of leadership. Leaders now have a dual responsibility: to steward the ethical, intentional integration of AI, and to champion and develop the human capabilities that AI can and should not replace.

Achieveing this does not require superhero leaders. However, it calls for leaders who create leadership around them by empowering teams, distributing responsibility, and holding people accountable for results. It calls for leaders with even greater self-awareness, curiosity, and a growth mindset.

AI is not leading us. We are leading AI. The question is how consciously, how collaboratively, and how human-centric we choose to do it. Let us lead with intention, with vision, and with a deep commitment to growing what makes us – and our organizations – truly great.

Simployer: Simployer is a Scandinavian HR tech company dedicated to making HR simple and scalable by putting the employee experience first. With over 40 years of expertise, 12,000 customers, and 1.2 million users, Simployer delivers an expert-built HRM system that combines intuitive software, learning resources, legal support, and digital workflows.

Enemark: Enemark is a leadership consulting firm founded in 2020 by Signe Enemark Kildesgaard. They work with organizations to strengthen leadership and culture, with a focus on supporting and developing management teams at all levels, designing and delivering leadership and change programs, and developing cross-functional leadership in complex environments.

LUNAI Consulting: LUNAI Consulting is an AI-native consultancy based in Copenhagen. Their mission is to help organizations lead, learn and integrate AI in a business-led, integrated and human-centric way. They work with clients to align AI with strategy & ethics, build adaptive roadmaps, foster growth mindsets and psychological safety, and enable co-creative cross-functional teams, ultimately turning AI ambition into real-world impact.

[1] Nataliya Kosmyna et al., Your Brain on ChatGPT: Accumulation of Cognitive Debt when Using an AI Assistant for Essay Writing Task, MIT Media Lab, preprint (June 2025).

[2] Isabella Loaiza and Roberto Rigobon, The EPOCH of AI: Human–Machine Complementarities at Work, MIT Sloan School of Management, working paper (November 2024).