AI won't replace leaders, silence will

Leadership communication is not a luxury in the age of AI. It is the stabilising force that keeps organisations from drifting into confusion.

By Michael Rickwood

Something unsettling is happening inside companies in 2025. AI systems are being deployed everywhere, all at once.

The promise is efficiency. The reality is disorder. I have not seen disruption at this scale before. The closest comparison is the arrival of the internet in the late 90s (when I was a student), when access to information was revolutionary yet overwhelming, and all organisations moved faster than their ability to explain what was happening.

So what’s happening? Structures are shifting. Teams are redefined overnight. Entire workflows are dismantled and rebuilt. This pressure does not land gently. It hits middle management, senior leadership and frontline teams simultaneously. And when change accelerates this fast, people do not need inspiration; they need clarity. They need meaning.

This is where leadership communication stops being 'optional'. Presentation skills are not a theatrical ‘nice to have’. They are part of the organisational infrastructure. When reframed as decision framing and sense-making in times of pressure, their strategic role becomes impossible to ignore.

When companies do things like adopt complex AI systems, the communication load increases, not decreases. Leaders must explain why decisions matter. They must name what is changing and what is not. They must address the unspoken fears people carry about relevance and role erosion. They must articulate new ways of working that even they are still learning. Silence, vagueness, or improvisation do real damage here.

One example I will give is Oracle. The scale of its current AI investment brings opportunity, but also internal strain. None of this signals failure. It signals transition. Every organisation moving at this speed faces the same risks. Communication friction. Alignment gaps. Confusion that no one wants to own. And because technology amplifies everything, small communication failures become systemic ones.

This is why leadership voice, message architecture and preparation matter now more than ever. Not as polish. Not as a soft skill.

Across industries and countries, I see the same pattern repeating. Leaders rush from one event to the next, improvising messages that should have been designed. Town halls are treated as obligations rather than strategic moments. Communication becomes reactive, vague, and disposable.

And mediocrity becomes normalised.

I recently attended an internal event in Paris that illustrated this perfectly. Poor structure. Sloppy hosting. Overlong speeches. Misalignment in messaging. The topic it promised to address never actually landed. Two hours disappeared. Nothing moved forward. This is not harmless. This is how organisations bleed momentum without noticing.

History shows that leaders who take communication seriously shape outcomes. Apple treated messaging, internally and externally, with the same discipline as its products. Nvidia’s rise has been accompanied by visible leadership and ruthless clarity. Not noise. Not improvisation. Design.

We are not entering a world where AI replaces the human voice. We are entering a world where the human voice becomes the differentiator. As machines automate, leaders must articulate. As complexity rises, clarity becomes a competitive advantage.

Communication is not a garnish. It is a leadership obligation.

It is the engine that will fix an awkward and confusing silence.