Leadership in the age of AI is the ability to set direction, govern and build trust in an organisation where a growing share of the work is done by AI systems and agents. Internal mobility in the age of AI is how that organisation moves its people into the roles their work is turning into. The two belong together. AI is reshaping jobs faster than most organisations are preparing their leaders and their people for it, and CHROs sit exactly where that gap has to be closed.
The urgency is real in Belgium. According to FOD Economie, 34.5% of Belgian companies used AI in 2025, well above the EU average of 20%. At the same time, 73% of Belgian employers report difficulty finding talent (ManpowerGroup, 2026), and 47% of Belgian employees feel insufficiently supported by their employer in the AI transition (SD Worx, 2026). Technology is moving in. The people side is not keeping pace.
This article draws on two recent events: the keynote Leading in the Age of Agentic AI by Ann Caluwaerts at The Exchange Belgium, organised by ManpowerGroup in Brussels, and the Right Executive Connect session with nearly 50 executives in career transition. Combined with Right Management's own research, they point to one conclusion: leadership and internal mobility are no longer separate topics, but one people agenda for the age of AI.
Key takeaways
The most common mistake organisations make with AI is handing it to IT as a technology topic. Earlier waves of change taught the same lesson: the role of leadership in digital transformation has always been decisive. Professor David De Cremer, author of The AI-Savvy Leader, describes AI as one of the biggest leadership challenges of our time, and the numbers support him. BCG found that companies creating value with AI put 10% of their resources into algorithms, 20% into technology and data, and 70% into people and processes.
Strategy matters more than tools. In BCG's AI at Work 2026 survey of 11,749 people, 80% of regular AI users with strong strategic clarity reported measurable AI impact, against 55% where clarity was low. Better access to tools alone added only five percentage points.
Ann Caluwaerts, former executive at BT and Telenet and board member at imec and Aedifica, opened her keynote with a personal story. When she left her executive role after 14 years, her colleagues gave her a farewell book. Not one message mentioned the transformations or the big deals. People wrote about being greeted in the hallway and receiving a phone call in the middle of a stressful merger. Her conclusion: "It is not about the what. It is about the how." As AI takes over more of the what, the how becomes the leader's real contribution: judgement, empathy and relationships.
Agentic AI is AI that reasons, plans and acts in digital systems, rather than only producing content. A generative AI tool asked to book a flight gives you a to-do list. An AI agent books the flight and sends you the confirmation. Chatbots answer. Agents act.
That shift is happening fast. Microsoft's 2026 Work Trend Index reports a fifteenfold year-on-year increase in active agents inside Microsoft 365. McKinsey estimates that AI systems could potentially complete four days of work without supervision by 2027. Teams will increasingly consist of both human and digital workers.
Agents also behave differently from traditional software. They learn from data rather than following explicit instructions, and they are probabilistic: they can be wrong with great confidence. Before any AI project, leaders should therefore ask two questions. What is our real business problem? And what data does the system need, or what has it been trained on?
Ann Caluwaerts summarised what leaders need to do in four imperatives. None of them can be delegated to IT.
Agents only do what you make explicit. A statement such as "by leveraging cutting-edge AI, we will revolutionise customer engagement" is useless to an agent. "We will reduce waiting times in our call centres by 25% using AI tools" is something it can work with.
Clarity is also a middle-management issue. McKinsey's State of Organizations 2026 found that 56% of C-suite leaders are clear on their must-win battles, against 27% of middle managers. Yet middle managers will be the ones managing agents.
During the keynote, the audience played an agent handling e-commerce returns with clear rules: within 30 days, tag on, receipt included, no damage. Then came a case two days past the deadline, from a loyal customer of twelve years. The room rejected it. A good employee would have approved it. Norms and implicit values are invisible to an agent unless you give them to it. The best way to think about an agent is as a brilliant new hire. Everything a new employee receives has an equivalent for an agent:
Agents are already being built across organisations, often without anyone keeping track. In 2024, Lattice announced it would add AI workers to its org chart, each with a human manager, and dropped the plan three days later after the backlash. The underlying need was real, though: every agent needs someone who is accountable for it.
An AI systems inventory is a register of every AI agent in use, recording its owner, its purpose, the data it touches, the actions it can take and when it will be reviewed. It is the most practical place to start. An agent without an owner is a decision with no name. Oversight should scale with autonomy and risk: an internal agent drafting status reports needs less supervision than a customer-facing agent taking consequential decisions.
AI changes jobs, workflows, structures, data and governance at the same time. It should be managed as one system of change, not as a series of tool rollouts. Work shifts from doing to orchestrating: from knowing the answer, doing the work and checking it yourself, to framing the problem, defining what good looks like and judging the result.
The model to aim for is the centaur: the human stays in the saddle and uses the horsepower of AI, keeping direction and judgement. Organisations should also expect the bottleneck to move from doing the work to reviewing it. Some processes may soon need more reviewers than doers.
People only embrace AI when they understand why it is happening, what it means for them and whether they can be part of it. In Belgium, a quarter of employees fear that AI will make a significant part of their tasks obsolete, and only 48% trust their organisation to use AI fairly, according to SD Worx.
Trust is the deciding factor. Korn Ferry's 2026 research shows that employees with high confidence in their leaders are nearly three times more likely to view AI favourably. Yet trust in senior leadership among non-executives fell from 68% in 2024 to 53% in 2026.
Leaders rebuild that trust by starting with why before explaining how. They answer the question every employee asks: what happens with the time AI frees up? And they invest in adoption, not only in licences. A typical failure pattern is spending heavily on software, offering a short training and stopping there. Right Management's own research, The Career Imperative, shows how wide the gap already is: just 15% of employees report receiving clear organisational guidance on their careers.
Psychological safety is not optional in this context. AI will make mistakes, and people must feel safe to flag them. As Gary Pisano wrote in Harvard Business Review, innovative cultures combine tolerance for failure with an intolerance for incompetence, and psychological safety with brutal candour and strong individual accountability.
AI will reshape far more jobs than it replaces. BCG's April 2026 analysis of around 165 million US jobs estimates that 50 to 55% will be reshaped by AI within two to three years, while 10 to 15% could be eliminated within five years or later. That puts internal mobility at the centre of workforce strategy.
The World Economic Forum's Future of Jobs Report 2025 expects 39% of workers' existing skill sets to be transformed or become outdated by 2030. Of every 100 workers, 29 can be upskilled in their current role and 19 can be redeployed elsewhere in the organisation. Half of employers plan to move staff from declining to growing roles.
CHROs already feel this. In the Adecco Group's 2026 research among CHROs, 51% say AI has already changed the skills required for roles in their organisation, but only 41% feel very confident in their AI implementation strategy, and just 36% have clearly defined which tasks should go to humans and which to AI. In a Belgian market where 73% of employers struggle to find talent, the people you already employ are your most reliable source of new skills.
AI can make internal mobility faster and fairer. Skills platforms can map capabilities, match employees to internal roles and projects, and spot hidden talent that would never surface through job titles alone. A structured skill gap analysis is often the right starting point. What AI cannot do is the human part of the move.
What AI tools do wellWhat leaders and HR must doMap skills and identify gapsDecide which roles and capabilities the strategy needsMatch people to internal roles and projectsRelease talent instead of holding on to itSuggest learning pathsCreate time and safety to learnTrack mobility and turnover dataHave the career conversation and build trust
Gartner found that employees hired for their ability to learn are 1.9 times more likely to perform effectively, yet when recruiting internally, 51% of managers still ask for candidates who already have every desired skill. Skills-based mobility only works when leaders look at potential rather than past job titles.
Internal mobility fails most often at the level of the direct manager, and without it employees settle into career inertia. In Belgium, 47% of organisations say managers stand in the way of internal mobility (SD Worx). The Career Imperativefound that four in ten employees have no career plan, and only one in five say their manager helps them map a career path.
Leaders who make internal mobility work do three things. They treat talent as an organisational asset, not a team possession. They capture the knowledge of their best people in shared context, so that both agents and new colleagues can work at that level. And they answer the four questions every employee has about AI: what are we doing with it, what does it mean for me, am I part of it, and will I be trained?
Leadership in the age of AI does not start with a large programme. It starts with a few deliberate moves.
These are the questions Ann Caluwaerts asked CHROs to put to themselves, extended with three on internal mobility.
Clarity
Control
Change
Care and culture
Internal mobility
Leadership in the age of AI is also reshaping the executive market. At the first post-summer Right Executive Connect session in Diegem, Geert Volders, Market Leader Belgium, and Barbera de Graaf, Senior Vice President Right Management EMEA and Asia Pacific, shared the latest European labour market trends with nearly 50 executives in career transition. The message was encouraging: executives who bring experience, maturity and the ability to drive change, including organisational transformation in the age of AI, remain in high demand.
Serge Gommé, Partner at Odgers, pointed out that executive search is a fast-growing global market, valued at around $64 billion today and projected to exceed $100 billion by 2031. Executive search is not about volume but about strategic alignment, and the best search partners act as trusted advisors who challenge assumptions and shape roles.
For CHROs, this has two implications. When selecting or developing leaders, the ability to lead transformation, build trust and work alongside AI should weigh as heavily as a functional track record. And experienced executives in transition are a talent pool worth a closer look, because they bring exactly the maturity that AI transformation requires.
Fabienne Lechat, former HR Director at Royal Canin and now an independent consultant, shared what her own transition taught her: "You do not need to see the entire path before you start moving forward. Sometimes, uncertainty is simply part of the journey. Clarity often comes once you begin." It is a lesson that applies to AI as much as to careers.
Right Management has been helping organisations and their people through change since 1980, and delivers more than 1,500 career programmes in Belgium every year. Our approach, The Right Way, combines data-driven insights, career-focused coaching and measurable outcomes. In the age of AI, we support CHROs on both sides of the transformation. Our Leadership Solutions, from leadership assessment to individual, team and peer coaching by Hogan-certified coaches, help leaders build the clarity, judgement and trust that leadership in the age of AI demands. Our Career Mobility and Changesolutions help organisations map skills, open up internal moves and guide employees into the roles their work is becoming. And when a transition is the right next step, our executive outplacement programmes help senior leaders find the role where their experience counts most.
Is your organisation preparing its leaders and its people as fast as AI is changing their work? Contact our experts to discuss how we can help your leaders and your workforce move forward together.
