Council Post: ​AI And Leadership: The 'Centaur' Organization And Why Emotional Intelligence Is Key

In a Council Post, Alexandra Zanela, founder of EQx and a scholar in psychology and organizational behavior, says organizations are moving beyond using AI simply to replace labor toward building “strategic composite orchestration.” She argues the leader’s job is no longer only managing people, but governing friction between human intuition and machine scale within a hybrid, “centaur” workforce. Zanela describes the centaur metaphor—popularized by Garry Kasparov after his 1997 loss to IBM’s Deep Blue—as a coordinated combination of human judgment with machine computational power. She links stronger emotional intelligence to leadership effectiveness as AI accelerates decisions, stressing skills like interpreting context, building trust, managing resistance, and applying AI-generated insights with human judgment.