AI Will Not Create Your Competitive Edge. Your Leadership Will – an article by Ivan Reusse, Head of Leadership Advisory at Grant Alexander Switzerland, for Le Monde Économique
31.08.2026
Only a year ago, the question was straightforward: “Should we use artificial intelligence?” Today, that question is no longer relevant. Employees are already using it. They draft emails with ChatGPT, Claude, and other tools, summarise documents, prepare presentations or automate certain administrative tasks.
Yet one observation keeps resurfacing in companies: despite this growing adoption, productivity gains often remain difficult to measure.
Why?
Because AI currently improves individual productivity above all, whereas real value creation is collective.
Take a very concrete example.
In a services SME, each project manager uses AI to prepare reports or save time on certain analyses. Each one may save an hour a day. On paper, that is excellent news.
But if approval processes remain unchanged, if meetings are still too frequent, if decisions continue to move through several hierarchical layers before being made, the company itself gains virtually nothing.
Employees move faster.
The organisation does not.
That is precisely where the real challenge lies today.
Artificial intelligence does not replace an efficient organisation. On the contrary, it exposes its limits. It acts as a spotlight: bringing to light the bottlenecks, duplicates and habits that are already holding back performance.
This is exactly when the role of the leader changes in nature. For years, performance meant optimising what already existed. Today, it means having the courage to challenge what seemed to be working. Artificial intelligence does not simply call for learning new tools; it forces leaders to rethink their habits, their decision-making processes and sometimes even the foundations of their organisation. It is an exercise in leadership far more than in technology.