When leadership starts hiding behind AI

There is a familiar pattern in management. A difficult decision arrives, responsibility becomes diffuse, and eventually the language around the decision grows more complicated than the decision itself.

Manjuri Sinha worries that AI is giving organisations a new version of that problem.

As VP HR at Miro, and previously through senior roles at OLX, Zalando and Accenture, she has spent much of her career close to the places where organisational decisions are made and then translated into the lives of employees. Her view is that leadership quality, particularly at C-suite level, remains one of the least comfortably examined problems inside growing companies.

AI may make that weakness harder to disguise.

Manjuri sees leaders becoming so preoccupied with AI that they begin to treat it as something more than a tool. Decisions that still require judgement are increasingly wrapped in the language of systems, models and optimisation. In the worst cases, technology becomes a convenient place to relocate responsibility.

She describes delegating leadership to AI as a “colossal mistake”.

For her, the problem is not that organisations are investing too heavily in technology. It is that some are investing in it without doing the slower work of building leaders who can make good decisions, explain them, and be accountable for the consequences.

That is why she also sees a larger role for boards. If leadership quality is allowed to become secondary to growth, speed or technological ambition, the weakness eventually travels through the organisation. AI can make that process faster. It cannot make it wiser.

Manjuri is equally sceptical of the way the public conversation about AI has developed.

She thinks too many conferences and professional forums now reproduce the same ideas, often borrowed from a small number of highly visible technology figures. Their arguments travel quickly because they are already amplified. Other perspectives struggle to get the same attention.

There is another subject she thinks has been pushed aside in the rush and will tackle with us, Oct 1st at Fair Barcelona:.

What happens to inclusion when organisations are redesigning work around AI?

It is easy for questions about fairness to disappear when attention shifts towards efficiency and capability. Yet decisions about whose work is automated, whose judgement remains valued, who gets access to new opportunities and who is considered adaptable are not neutral decisions.

Manjuri has spent years arguing for what she calls human-centric AI. In practice, that means treating AI as a means rather than an authority. Her definition of a fair workplace is one that still tries to build better people, not simply more efficient systems.

She is not especially interested in attendees leaving FAIR with a single approved conclusion.

Quite the opposite. She hopes people encounter ideas they disagree with, including perspectives that rarely reach the top of a LinkedIn feed. She wants them to become less comfortable with borrowed certainty and more willing to look for opposing evidence before deciding what they believe.

That may be one of the more useful disciplines as AI becomes embedded in organisational life. The technology will produce more answers. Leadership will still have to decide which ones deserve to be trusted.

Manjuri Sinha joins us as a speaker at FAIR Barcelona on 1 October 2026.

👉🏼 Book your seat and be there for the sharpest insights!

www.faircultures.com/fairbarcelona