XTCT-954 - Transformational Leadership for the AI Era
Course Description
The AI era is changing more than technology. It is reshaping how decisions are made, how work is organized, and what people need from their leaders. Senior leaders must act without complete information, make consequential choices at unprecedented speed, and balance strategic demands with profound questions of trust, identity, agency, and meaning at work. The Executive Certificate in Transformational Leadership for the AI Era prepares leaders to meet this moment with greater clarity, judgment, and humanity.
The curriculum combines Georgetown’s expertise in transformational leadership with applied content from its graduate programs in technology and AI management. Participants will build the fluency to engage with AI strategy, governance, organizational redesign, and human-AI collaboration while strengthening their ability to create direction, build coalitions, make values-based decisions, define and compare alternative courses of action, and translate vision into action. Grounded in Georgetown’s Jesuit tradition and cura personalis, care for the whole person, the program challenges leaders to advance organizational performance while preserving dignity, strengthening agency, and helping people navigate changes to their work and professional identity. Through case studies, simulations, role-play, peer consultation, and engagement with subject matter experts experienced practitioners, participants develop their skills and deepen their understanding of how their leadership shapes what becomes possible for their organizations and people.
The hybrid learning experience includes four weeks of online learning with weekly live, interactive lectures and case studies, a three-day residency at Georgetown’s Capitol Campus, and two confidential sessions with a matched ICF-credentialed executive coach. A small, application-based carefully selected cohort brings together senior leaders from diverse sectors and functions, making their collective experience a powerful source of learning and challenge.
Participants leave with a stronger leadership stance, practical tools and commitments they can apply immediately, and greater clarity about the leader they must become to guide others through the defining transformation of our time. AI’s rapid advancement will be explained and demystified, with a focus on understanding the future, and how it will impact organizations.
Course Objectives
Learning Outcomes:
- Lead from a clear sense of their leadership identity, purpose, and presence, and recognize how each shows up in the decisions, conversations, and signals their organization receives from them daily.
- Practice the four classical tenets of transformational leadership, idealized influence, inspirational motivation, intellectual stimulation, and individualized consideration, in situations specific to leading a complex organization in the AI Era.
- Read Build the leadership context of the AI Era, the compressed time horizons, the simultaneous human and
- operational stakes, and the constant redesign of work, and lead in ways equal to that context.
- Make consequential decisions under uncertainty with judgment that integrates strategic clarity, ethical seriousness, the human stakes of the work, and the leader's own values.
- Cultivate cura personalis as a leadership discipline, care for the whole person, under the pressure of complex transformation, including the difficult conversations the AI Era demands about identity, agency, and meaning at work.
- Build and lead the cross-functional coalitions, decision rights, and execution disciplines that complex transformations require, as the operational expression of the leader's vision and values.
- Lead the human side of AI-driven transformation, including identity threat, agency loss, role redesign, and the redistribution of work between people and machines, with both operational discipline and human seriousness.
- Sustain presence, judgment, and resilience across the long arc of leading a complex organization through transformation, supported by structured coaching, a working peer cohort, and a consciously developed leadership practice.
- Understand how AI evolved, where it’s going, and how to manage, govern and integrate it with a focus on outcomes.