How can AI scale and accelerate leadership maturity development?

Scaling leadership development and accelerating maturity gains for leaders and emerging leaders is one of the greatest challenges I have identified in recent studies and conversations with HR professionals and business owners. And that is why I have dedicated most of my productive time to understanding how AI can be a powerful ally in this process.

Imagine the following scenario:

A leader who has just hired a senior professional for the team — someone with more experience than him as a cybersecurity specialist. In the first few weeks, every time he needs to delegate an important task, he only asks what needs to be done, without further detail (assuming the direct report understood).

However, a few weeks after onboarding, he realises that the employee is not delivering tasks as he should, making mistakes in alignment with team objectives and culture.

There is no villain in this story

There is a competent leader facing a common leadership challenge:

• listen to the new professional,
• and align expectations and aspirations, company needs and individual potential.

And the solution is usually not complicated:

• align expectations clearly,
• set the level of autonomy that person will have,
• and train the mindset of trusting the process, not just the result.

I like this type of situation because it shows what is, fundamentally, 90% of a leader's work: it's not solving big crises, it's unblocking micro-problems like this, every single day, before they become resentment, or worse, become culture.

And that is precisely where AI is entering strongly in leadership development.

Why does AI help scale maturity gains?

After large language models became popular, organisations around the world began adapting this technology to create personalised assistants that help employees access relevant content for their activities in the organisation.

This movement occurs in an attempt by organisations to personalise development without needing to invest large sums in individual, high-quality human coaching and mentoring.

6 problems that Corporate Education must solve

1st. Reduce schedule conflicts between training and job responsibilities,
2nd. Increase engagement in one's own development – with hyperpersonalisation,
3rd. Scale personalised development without investment scaling proportionally,
4th. Promote effective behavioural change that each employee needs – when the demand arises – without gap between training and application,
5th. Provide continuous support for employee development,
6th. Facilitate data extraction on human and organisational development.

And it makes sense. AI enables offering development support at scale, at any hour of the day, creating a safe space for the leader to dialogue about a question or difficulty. However, generative AI without curation, the right context, and continuous adjustment, instead of helping, can often harm leadership development.

Here lies the danger

Along with this trend comes a real risk, and I see this up close every day: AI's natural tendency is to deliver standardised response. The topic can be hyperpersonalised, but the AI's response or guidance tends to be generic. However, each leader is on a unique journey and, therefore, more than just offering an AI tool is needed.

The most important situations a leader faces — a conflict of values within the team, a difficult decision about someone who is not performing, an insecurity he does not even admit to himself — require context (the business's culture and strategy), require listening (the ability to recognise what is most relevant to the leader), require genuine human support. An insensitive mentor, like an AI without curation or training, would deliver a standard answer for everyone, and would not transform behaviour. And the problem would remain the same – it would be like putting a check on development without aligning it to business results and, therefore, having value for the organisation.

Leadership maturity is the result of behavioural change

I usually say that leadership is not an operation, it is behaviour. And behaviour does not change with standard response. It changes with a customised reading of each leader's situation and pain, with follow-up on knowledge application, with someone – or an AI with a very well-trained quality collection with human experience and, at the same time, that knows your context, your team, your history.

The path is not to replace the human mentor with AI

The truth I see confirming itself more and more is: AI did not come to replace the human mentor. It came to amplify his reach. Alone, with a generic database, it facilitates learning and reduces cost – but it does not support the emotional complexity of a difficult leadership decision. That is still human work. And it will continue to be.

That was exactly the reasoning that guided the construction of mentorIA, Upskill's virtualised mentor with AI.

The mentorIA is not a generic chatbot connected to just any language model. It is powered by the six books that make up the series "The Mind of the Leader of the Future". It is also trained on more than 50,000 mentoring sessions conducted around the world. And it has access to the knowledge of more than 200 certified mentors and specialists.

It is not knowledge sourced from the internet without curation. It is real know-how, accumulated by people who have spent more than 20 years developing leadership behaviour in leaders in the most diverse positions and companies.

mentorIA never works alone

At Upskill, mentoring programmes are always hybrid: humans + AI. The ratio between AI mentoring and human mentoring varies. This ratio can reach 90% (AI) + 10% (human) – when the main need is to scale personalised behavioural development. In any case, all programmes include regular individual and group human mentoring sessions, maintaining humanisation and accelerating effective behavioural change.

mentorIA acts between sessions with the human mentor – it reinforces what was worked on and keeps the behaviour change plan alive in the daily routine. It provides 24-hour support for questions that arise during working hours. But the deep session, the difficult conversation, the fine reading of a delicate situation — that continues to be human.

Scaling 1:1 human mentoring to all leadership and emerging leaders can be unfeasible. That is why AI plays the role of making access to personalised content and learning journey at scale viable. And, thus, it accelerates the maturity gain that the human mentor is driving.

The problem is not lack of content. It is the excess.

There is a trap that I see every company fall into when it decides to "apply technology" to leadership development: stack content. Giant library, dozens of videos, endless learning paths. And the result is always the same – the leader enters, looks at all that and does not know where to start.

Even being disciplined, even designing a development path he should follow, content will still not always speak to the situation he is living in the present. And, without seeing applicability in course and workshop content, it is possible that this will overwhelm the leader instead of directing him to develop.

Development requires knowledge base + personalisation

Corporate university can create the foundation. It can even have fundamental culture training and technical content. But this does not fill individual behavioural gaps. This only happens when development is personalised.

That is why, within mentorIA, we do not deliver ready-made content from the shelf. We deliver curation: the right knowledge, in the right amount, at the moment the leader needs it most.

Content drops

Recently, aiming to better engage the leader to begin their sessions with mentorIA, we created "content drops". These pills are short and objective reflections on the topics that most appear in the daily life of those who lead people. Topics such as: resilience, self-discipline, team engagement, burnout.

Each drop is quick to read and already comes with practical guidance. It is not loose theory, but something the leader can apply that same afternoon. And, from there, if he wants to go deeper, he can read the full content. Or better, he can start a session with the virtualised mentor – mentorIA. Thus, the conversation with the AI-supported mentor already comes with context.

This way, we want to help the employee/leader recognise, in the midst of the rush, what their real challenge is in the present moment. The drops aim to facilitate the beginning of a session with the virtualised mentor. And, thus, the leader can receive a spot-on guidance on how to act to overcome individual challenges in an assertive manner.

We do not deliver just a mentor with AI

This is a point I make a point of making clear, because the market tends to oversimplify. It is not possible for an employee to access a generative AI offered by the company, without clarity about what needs to develop, and only that interaction to sustain behavioural change.

What makes mentorIA work is not just the model behind it or the support of the human mentor – it is all the support around it. Upskill's platform maps the leadership profile, measures the most critical behavioural skills, offers dashboards that show progress for the HR team, the e-mails and drops that bring the leader back to their development at the right time and continuously measures the result of the mentoring programme.

AI calibrated for your context is just one part of what will actually scale and accelerate the maturing of leaders and emerging leaders.

Overcoming the challenge of engaging employees in leadership maturity development

And yes, I know that one of the greatest challenges the company faces in any training model is engagement. And this happens in any programme, training, internal mentoring, content platform, why would it be different with AI?

The answer is exactly in the curation I described above and in the vision of progress towards individual and business objectives. When you take away from the leader the work of mining for content and deliver to him only what is relevant, when he needs it, engagement increases.

Another challenge when implementing AI in development is information and data security. Any AI solution applied to people must make clear how data is handled, stored and protected. There must be complete transparency for the user, and for the client.

And there is a third challenge, more silent, that I hear directly from HR leaders: how to justify mentoring for only some executives, at the top, while the rest of the company stays out? This is, perhaps, the best answer that AI gives to leadership development: since the cost per person drops so much, you can scale genuine mentoring to all levels of leadership – not just for those who have already made it to the top – and generate significant transformation in leader performance and more sustainable business results.

Back to our leader

If that leader had mentorIA available right at the moment he realised his own difficulty in delegating, he would not need to wait weeks until a bigger problem appeared, or even wait for the next human mentoring session to solve his problem.

A drop about delegation and trust would have already placed the right reflection in front of him, at the right moment — and from there, if he wanted to go deeper, he could simply continue the conversation with mentorIA, which would already know the context. He would have, there, immediate support, built on a consolidated methodology, to act with more confidence right in the first difficult conversation with the new senior professional — and the next session with the human mentor would be even richer, because behavioural change would already be in motion.

That is the kind of leadership I want to help build: a leadership that does not wait for the next training, the next session, the next annual feedback to evolve. A leadership that develops every day — with cutting-edge technology and human experience, together, working towards the same goal.

Are you a business owner living this challenge of scaling effective behavioural change in your leaders and teams?

I would love to help you understand better at what point of this journey you and your company are.

Schedule a free assessment and trial period.