Why Every Leader Needs To Become An Ai Leader (plus Free Courses To Get Started)

If your leadership team isn’t embracing AI yet, it’s time to get going. 

Just as every leader became a technology leader during the rise of the internet, every leader now is becoming an AI leader. And you certainly don’t need to have “AI” in your title to help lead AI transformation. CEOs, CHROs, CMOs, CROs, and leaders of all backgrounds are starting to embrace AI in their own jobs to spur new levels of growth. The urgency is real: 88% of global executives say speeding up AI adoption is a top priority this year, according to our recent survey of nearly 2,000 global C-suite leaders. 

The AI skills explosion  

Recent findings from LinkedIn's Skills on the Rise report paint a clear picture: AI literacy has quickly emerged as one of the fastest-growing and most in-demand skills in the world of work.  

Across industries and borders, employers are looking for people who know how to harness AI tools to drive business impact. Increasingly, this means taking a hard look at their own C-suite to ensure that leaders are ready to lead this transformation from the front. Globally, C-suite executives admit AI is the No. 1 skill their leaders need to build to navigate business transformation.

The good news? Members of the C-suite are starting to rise to the challenge. Nearly three times more C-suite members globally on LinkedIn today have added AI literacy skills, such as prompt engineering and use of generative AI tools, to their profiles compared with two years ago, with these same executives now 1.2x more likely to add AI literacy skills than the rest of the workforce. 

But despite steady progress, it’s not an even picture across the board. Roughly 4 in 10 global C-suite leaders admit their own leadership team is still a barrier to AI adoption, due to not being trained on how to use AI, not yet convinced of AI’s ROI, or not yet having a change management plan. For some companies, leadership teams still need to get out of their own way to realize the potential benefits of scaling AI adoption across the business.

How the C-suite uses AI today 

If you’re looking for inspiration on how to get your leadership team AI-ready, there are lots of executives out there to look to who are using AI in their day-to-day and seeing the gains firsthand.

Embracing AI transforms business

The business impact of getting this right is staggering: Recent LinkedIn research shows that 51% of organizations reported revenue increases of 10% or more after adopting generative AI. That’s just an early indicator of what’s to come in the next few years as the tools become more sophisticated and our teams become advanced in how we use them.

Beyond the bottom-line impact, leaders that bring AI tools into the mix in ways that complement their teams’ uniquely human skills are on the bleeding edge of the new economy that’s starting to emerge: an innovation economy where our unique ability as humans to invent, innovate, and collaborate finally comes to the center of work. Because AI is ultimately much more than a time-saver, it’s an innovation accelerator — helping more people from more places bring their best ideas to life no matter their job title or background. That economy is already starting to take shape, with 70% of businesses using GAI saying they are doing so to spark innovation and creativity, even more than automating routine tasks. 

Free courses to get started 

In partnership with Microsoft, LinkedIn has unlocked a range of AI learning courses including two professional certificates designed to help leadership teams get started on AI upskilling. These courses are unlocked and free to access through December 31, 2025: 

• AI for Organizational Leaders: A professional certificate with six curated courses on how to make informed decisions about AI adoption and application as an organizational leader, including evaluating the business implications of generative AI and driving business growth. 
  • Featured course: Generative AI for Business Leaders by Tomer Cohen, LinkedIn's chief product officer. 
• AI for Managers: A professional certificate with six curated courses on practical ways managers can enhance their effectiveness with generative AI — from making team and one-on-one meetings more effective to giving feedback that gets results. Managers can also learn how to have meaningful career conversations with employees in an AI context, build a collaborative team culture with generative AI, and use AI responsibly.
  

To help leaders upskill their entire organizations, LinkedIn and Microsoft created AI skill pathways with over 150 AI professional certificates, certification prep, and learning paths by role and level of the LinkedIn AI Upskilling Framework. Access 27 unlocked AI skill pathways through July 31, 2025, to help learners develop, practice, and validate AI skills.  

Methodology 

C-suite AI skills: LinkedIn Economic Graph researchers examined the share of over 1 million senior leaders (VP and CXOs) from large companies (more than 1,000 employees) in 16 countries (Australia, Brazil, Canada, France, Germany, India, Ireland, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States) who have listed at least one AI literacy skill in the given year, and also compared this group with the share of all other professionals who have listed at least one AI literacy skill in the same year.

Global C-suite research: Global research of 1,991 C-suite executives (chief executive officer, chief human resources officer, chief marketing officer, chief revenue officer, and chief technology officer) in nine countries (Australia, Brazil, France, Germany, India, Singapore, United Arab Emirates, United Kingdom, United States) working in businesses with 1,000 or more employees. Fieldwork was conducted by YouGov between November 26 and December 13, 2024. 

AI & the Global Economy Report: In this report, we draw on anonymized and aggregated data from the LinkedIn platform, used by more than 1 billion members and 67 million companies worldwide, to provide an unparalleled look at how AI is impacting the global economy and workforce. This report also leverages economic and survey analysis conducted by Access Partnership to understand the economic potential of GAI, the current state of GAI adoption, and GAI’s impact on businesses. For more information on Access Partnership’s methodology, please refer to their report.