AI can enhance learning experiences and reveal unforeseen insights, but leadership development isn’t just about what technology enables. Shaping leaders across your organization requires more than algorithms alone can provide. It requires human wisdom.
We believe leadership’s strength comes from human values, ingenuity, and connection. AI in leadership development accelerates and deepens our programs and research, but human expertise ensures what we create is trustworthy, ethical, meaningful, and actionable.
By combining rigorous research methods with advanced technology, we’ve designed an approach where humans and AI work together to reveal insights that drive lasting leadership impact and responsibly advance leadership development.
A Case Study: Using AI to Help Senior Leaders See Data About How They Lead
Our HiFi Conversation Analytics™ tool combines human expertise with AI in one of our leadership programs. HiFi helps senior leaders understand their behaviors in the Looking Glass, Inc.® simulation of our Leading for Organizational Impact program.
HiFi uses wearable technology to capture leaders’ conversations during the simulation, tracking data such as speaking time and interactions with others. While technology excels at measuring and detecting patterns we can’t easily see, humans provide essential context, judgment, and developmental guidance that AI can’t replicate. This collaboration exists at every stage — from designing the solution and validating data to implementing insights in a program — to ensure AI’s contributions to our leadership development program are accurate, ethical, and meaningful.
Here’s a deeper look at each stage.
Design: Human Judgment Guides AI Potential
Measurement without purpose is just noise. The most sophisticated AI tool isn’t useful if it doesn’t help leaders change what matters. That’s why our design process for integrating HiFi into our Leading for Organizational Impact program started with a human question: What behaviors, if measured and made visible, would help senior leaders grow?
The program helps leaders see themselves as part of an organizational system, not standalone actors. Our emphasis on system-wide influence is based in part on an AI-powered language model we use to analyze thousands of leadership challenges that senior leaders reported to us — 6 of the top 10 senior leader challenges involve working within a larger system.
When we designed HiFi for this program, we prioritized metrics that reveal interdependence: Whose perspective did you seek? How did that impact your influence? Those questions came from decades of leadership research on systems thinking, the program’s learning objectives, and what we know drives behavior change — not from what AI happened to capture easily.
While AI enables breadth (capturing everything), humans provide focus (choosing what matters). We’re now leveraging advancements in AI to deepen HiFi’s analytical capabilities — but the same principle holds. AI expands what we can measure and analyze while human judgment determines whether those insights help leaders grow.
Validation: Helping AI Align With Human Expertise
Humans must supervise AI inputs and outputs. Before HiFi analyzes conversations, we validate it through a rigorous, cyclical process borrowed from decades of assessment science: content analysis.
Expert human coders review conversation transcripts line by line, making judgments based on well-supported leadership frameworks. For example, is this statement focused on making sure the group achieves its objectives, or on recognizing the contributions of individual members? When multiple coders agree on their assessments, those judgments then guide the AI on what to look for. The AI isn’t leading; it’s learning to replicate expert human judgment at scale.
This is supervised learning in action. We’re skeptical of deploying models without this kind of fine-tuning, because unsupervised AI can miss context and produce misleading results.
Even as we integrate more sophisticated AI capabilities into HiFi, the research perspective remains: human experts set the standard, and technology is evaluated against that standard. AI expands our capacity to analyze conversations at scale, but it earns that role by proving it can reliably mirror the judgments humans would make.
Implementation: Humans Make AI Insights Meaningful
The data itself doesn’t create change — the conversation about the data does. During their Leading for Organizational Impact journey, participants receive HiFi-generated behavioral feedback alongside peer ratings and collective impact data. But sensemaking is a deeply human process. What matters is whether leaders can understand the data, connect it to their experience, discuss it with their peers and facilitators, and see how to use it to guide their development. That’s where human expertise is essential for AI in leadership development to have real impact.
Our facilitators are deeply involved in observing what resonates with leaders, what confuses them, and what sparks insight. Their feedback shapes how we present the data: which visualizations work best, what language makes the data accessible, how much data is too much. These aren’t technical decisions an algorithm can make — they require human judgment about what helps people learn.
During one session, for example, the HiFi insights showed a leader had high speaking time and strong influence scores — technically good data. But the facilitator noticed something: every time this leader spoke, their counterpart went quiet. The algorithm saw influence. The leader saw they had taken space to the detriment of the group. That’s the conversation the group needed to have, and the facilitator in the room helped surface it.
Facilitation also means tailoring programs to fit the client’s context. We implement HiFi through custom programs in partnership with clients, integrating it with other solutions to achieve specific goals. For example, when an organization wanted to improve how leaders give and receive feedback, we combined HiFi with our Situation – Behavior – Impact (SBI)™ feedback model. A knowledgeable facilitator who understood the client’s culture and challenges collaborated closely with them, leveraging an AI-supported tool to co-design a better experience.
What This Means for Your Organization
AI expands what’s possible in leadership development. But it’s human expertise in design, validation, and implementation that ensures those possibilities help your leaders’ development become a reality. As you explore AI-enabled tools for your organization, and consider where deploying AI in leadership development programs might fit, ask yourself: Who’s making the critical decisions about what gets measured, what it means, and how it helps leaders develop?
Ready to Take the Next Step?
At CCL, we’re exploring how human expertise can shape the use of AI in leadership development. Our Leading for Organizational Impact program leverages insights from HiFi, plus 360 assessments and executive coaching, to help senior leaders become more strategic and effective in their organizations.
