The Role of a Leader Today

Question number 3.With AI transforming roles within months, what is a leader's priority today?

A: experiment.B: encourage innovation.C: rethink the organization.

Or D: the Joker.I'd say experiment first.I'm hesitating.

Experimenting is very important, but I'll still go with encouraging innovation.

To encourage innovation, it's not enough to just say so.

You actually have to experiment as a first step.For me, the two are almost inseparable.

That's why it was hard to choose — but it's great because you can combine them.

For me, encouraging innovation means pushing for adoption and finding systems to do so.

On the experimentation side, what I see as a very real challenge is that people were already overwhelmed before AI arrived.

The promise of AI is: it's going to help you be more productive, etc.

But in the short term, what studies show — there was a Harvard study that just came out, which clearly shows that in fact, it's adding working time.

We haven't really seen the productivity gains yet.

I read the same thing — and for now, it's not at all established.

It's not established.And that makes sense, because to train yourself, you really have to take the time.

That time — when you're an exec at a company — where do you find it?

I find it incredibly difficult.At one of the companies I work with, one of the directors decided to train himself on this using Claude.

He's on Claude Code, so it's even a bit more technical.

He spends an hour and a half a day on it — from 7:30 to 9:00 AM.

That's great.But what do you do if you have kids you need to take to school and so on?

You do it at night, on weekends, during holidays.There's really a bit of a situation today...

This might be more of a tech company phenomenon, but as soon as you want to start experimenting, it takes time that you don't necessarily have as a leader.

And then the other question is: how far do you go?

Particularly, there are companies saying: Today, we need to invest in AI and the compute costs are such...

That they'd rather keep investing there than invest in their own workforce — but in my view, we're nowhere near yet rethinking the entire organization. In marketing, I'd say we already are.

We're in a mode of rethinking not just the organization,but the actual roles — quite profoundly.

It's truly a team and a function that is in the middle of a tsunami.

It's genuinely rethinking the marketing profession and therefore the jobs.

AI can handle a large portion of that production work.

So you have roles where it's now very easy to produce something good enough with AI tools.

So the challenge is: where do I actually bring real creativity?

What is AI doing now that I used to do but no longer do?

So it really raises the question of marketing jobs — for all the roles related to producing marketing assets.

In HR, are the roles transforming or not?Or is it a bit early? The roles are transforming.

I think there's much more happening today.Before, HR was often seen as a support function relative to other teams.

I think today it will become totally central, because HR has access to enormous amounts of data.

Maybe that data isn't being used today in the best possible way,but precisely because of that, they're going to be the central pillar, in my view, of a company,because they'll be guiding all of this change.

Indeed — this change, this revolution, is systemic.

Thank you very much for sharing your experiences, Segolene and Guillaume.

The debate is over.Thank you very much, Segolene — it was really enjoyable.

Thank you, Guillaume.So — how are they experiencing this?

Are they scared about what's going to happen?Or are they thinking: They'll be left aside, they'll be a bit left behind?