The future belongs to technical leaders
The quality of technical judgement will increasingly determine the quality of strategic judgement.
And in the next decade, many companies will be limited by the technical judgement of their leaders.
Too often, the people making the biggest decisions about software, data, and AI can’t tell whether those systems are any good.
They can’t judge the work itself, so they judge the things around it. The polish, the pitch, the promises.
This has probably always been true. But AI makes it a much bigger deal.
With traditional software, failure is often easier to spot and easier to trace. When something fails, there are usually breadcrumbs to follow.
AI systems are different. They can fail while looking like they are working. They can produce plausible-sounding answers that are wrong. Noticing that they failed at all is part of the problem.
This matters because AI is going to change every business. It will shape how companies sell, serve customers, manage risk, structure their workforce, write software, make decisions, and compete.
As that happens, more and more strategic decisions will depend on technical systems that senior leaders don’t understand, whose failures they can’t reliably see, and whose behaviour they can’t explain.
If those decisions go wrong, leaders won’t be able to hide behind technical teams.
They’ll need to think for themselves. Technical judgement will stop being a specialist capability and become a core leadership skill. Leaders do not need to code. But they do need to know when a technology is real enough to bet the company on.
But most companies have not caught up to this yet. Technical judgement is still scarce at the top; it's seen as useful, but not central. Something to have nearby, not something to build leadership around.
And this will lead to bad bets about the future. Companies will miss real opportunities, overcommit to false ones, and struggle to tell the difference.
The old idea that being technical makes someone less suited to leadership is going to look increasingly wrong. In many companies, the opposite will be true.
Technical people will not automatically become great leaders. But effective leadership will become harder without technical judgement.
This will become obvious as AI spreads, as “technical questions” will simply become business questions.
Firms whose leaders lack this judgement will blunder. They will miss what matters, act on false assumptions, and make mistakes at company scale.
The people who have it will matter enormously. The future belongs to them.