Culturally Anchored Superagency: A New Mandate for AI-Era Leadership

As artificial intelligence reshapes global business, it is not merely tasks and workflows that are being transformed — it is the very nature of leadership. Increasingly, decisions are delegated, strategies simulated, and core functions augmented by AI. But amid this acceleration, one question remains insufficiently addressed: Whose agency is being amplified?

Today’s AI discourse often celebrates capability and scale. But real leadership advantage now lies in something subtler: the ability to anchor that capability within ethical, psychological, and cross-cultural intelligence. Without such grounding, organizations risk creating systems that are efficient, scalable — and misaligned with their own values.

This is why I propose a new leadership imperative: Culturally Anchored Superagency.

From Technical Leverage to Human-Centered Leadership

The idea of “superagency,” recently popularized by McKinsey, speaks to an emerging mode of AI-enabled leadership — where individuals are not simply supported by technology, but meaningfully augmented by it. These systems accelerate human cognition, automate complexity, and unlock a new scale of strategic optionality.

But superagency, when unmoored from cultural and ethical context, can also accelerate bias, reinforce inequity, and erode trust. I’ve seen this dynamic firsthand over two decades of leadership consulting across more than 50 countries. In nearly every region and industry, the same lesson emerges: while AI may be technically universal, its adoption is socially and culturally particular.

This becomes clear when we examine frameworks like BCG’s “10-20-70” rule — which asserts that 70% of successful AI integration depends on people and processes, not technology. And yet, too many executive teams remain fixated on the 30% that feels more manageable: models, data, and tools. What is needed is not just a redistribution of focus, but a recalibration of what leadership means in the AI era.

The Quiet Risk of Ethical Drift

To understand the stakes, consider a concept I refer to as Ethical Drift: the slow, often unnoticed, erosion of values that occurs when organizations implement AI without regular recalibration of their ethical direction.

It rarely begins with ill intent. In many cases, it starts with marginal efficiency gains — perhaps a model that speeds hiring decisions, or a recommendation engine that personalizes customer interactions. But over time, if these systems are not examined for bias, inclusivity, and evolving norms, the drift becomes systemic. Organizations may find themselves scaling decisions that no longer reflect their declared principles — or worse, that actively undermine them.

This is not a technical failure. It is a leadership one.

To counteract ethical drift, leaders must embed oversight not as an afterthought, but as a core part of AI strategy. This requires a governance model that is dynamic, context-aware, and attuned to cultural nuance. It also demands humility — the recognition that leadership in this space is iterative, and that past decisions must be reexamined as norms evolve.

Redefining the Role of the Leader

In this context, culturally anchored superagency offers a more complete vision for AI-era leadership. It challenges executives to:

• Design workflows that empower people alongside machines

• Interrogate the assumptions encoded into AI agents and decision systems

• Establish governance structures that are inclusive, transparent, and adaptive

• Frame inclusion not as a program, but as a core capability of resilient leadership

Culturally anchored superagency is not about achieving perfection. It is about cultivating responsiveness — the capacity to notice when your systems are drifting, and the integrity to realign them.

The Way Forward

The most significant risk facing leaders today is not that AI will outpace them. It is that they will scale systems built on outdated assumptions — and do so with increasing speed and confidence.

Leadership in this moment requires more than vision. It requires depth. It requires the willingness to hold technological possibility in one hand, and human complexity in the other.

For those seeking to lead through this complexity — not around it — this is the work ahead.