AI is being sold as the biggest productivity shift in a generation. The leaders responsible for making it work are far less certain about what it will actually deliver.
That tension set the tone for our first Northern CPO Breakfast Forum in Leeds, where Chief People Officers and senior HR leaders from across financial and professional services came together to separate the reality of leading in the AI era from the hype.
What the research tells us
NSCG’s Future Leaders Survey 2025 found that 95% of leaders expect AI to increase employee productivity and 80% believe leaders will need different capabilities to lead in the AI era. Yet only 61% have started reviewing their leadership competencies, and 51% say adoption is still a work in progress. Most telling of all, only around a third expect AI to have an impact on revenue.
Leadership is becoming orchestration
Leaders are moving from owning decisions to creating the clarity, boundaries and accountability that let good decisions happen across teams, tools and workflows. None of that is new. What AI changes is the scale and the speed, plus a new judgement call: how far the human needs to stay in the loop.
Who owns AI Matters
In some organisations technology leads and HR is left to design the people side afterwards. In others, HR wants to move faster than its infrastructure allows. The risk is a two-speed organisation, where the people writing AI policy and capability frameworks have less access to the tools than the people they support.
Trust is the biggest barrier
Trust runs in two directions: in the technology itself, and in what the organisation plans to do with it. Much adoption is happening quietly, with people saving time but keeping it to themselves. Using AI is still seen as a personal advantage. At some point not using it becomes an organisational disadvantage, and few businesses are there yet.
the psychological contract needs resettling
AI changes how value is created, which raises hard questions for reward frameworks still anchored in hours, utilisation and output. If the work gets faster, the best adopters can end up looking less productive. With five generations in the workplace, the contract needed rethinking before AI arrived. AI simply makes the conversation more urgent.
Redesign the work dont just automate it
This is where the productivity and revenue gap starts to make sense. Adding AI to a clunky process speeds up the wrong things. Automation also removes simple work first, leaving more complex roles that cost more to fill. The starting point is a deceptively simple question: what does great look like in an AI-enabled organisation?
The conversation still to have:
Two further themes came through strongly. Succession is becoming a real pressure point as a generation of senior leaders approaches retirement and the skills needed to replace them shift. And the true costs of AI, from rising usage costs to legacy systems and environmental impact, rarely make it into the business case.
Where the room landed
- Redesign the work before automating it
- Bring people and technology leaders into the same room
- Rethink what you reward as time breaks down as a measure of value
- Make the contract with your people explicit
- Be thoughtful, not just fast
what is next?
Our next Northern CPO Breakfast Forum takes place on Wednesday 20 January 2027, 8:30 to 10:30am: People, Performance and AI: What the next 3 to 5 years mean for CPOs.
We’re also inviting CPO’s to take part in The CPO of the Future, our research into how the role is evolving across financial and professional services.
If you lead HR at a financial or professional services business in the UK and would like to join us, find out more here: NSCG CPO Breakfast Forum