Leading in the Age of AI

Silvio Sangineto has spent around 15 years building human-AI products and organizations, working across engineering, product, design and leadership in several countries, and coaching founders and business leaders along the way. He deliberately leaves the brand names out of his story. What pushed him to write a book was noticing that leaders are good at telling everyone else to reskill and change, and much less good at asking the same questions of themselves. So he interviewed leaders across industries, from VCs to startups to corporates, to find out what leadership actually adds in the age of AI. He didn’t frame the book as design or UX leadership, because those functions are blurring, and responsibility for where AI takes society sits with leadership as a whole.

The leaders he interviewed often disagreed with each other, but they kept describing the same costs. He calls them taxes, because they’re unavoidable: the goal isn’t to avoid paying them but to structure how you pay. One is perpetual unlearning: the expertise that earned your promotion can now weigh you down. Another is political. The best AI systems are invisible and their ROI is still ambiguous, so they’re hard to defend, and the initiatives that survive tend to be the easy, visible ones. A third is cognitive humility, which he separates from abdication: saying “I don’t understand the model” while making choices with second-order effects on the planet isn’t humility. He sees leadership theater in companies that still measure AI transformation by tool adoption in 2026. Adoption is built to climb, so it only confirms what you expected. The real question is what got better once you break a real job into real tasks, and what waste you created along the way.

For UX, he thinks this could be the best era yet. For 20 years designers fought for a seat at the table. Now AI lets them cover skills they didn’t have time to build, and the ones who push past their own function and use their systems thinking can finally shape how companies build the business models of the future. He’s critical of a tech leadership culture that says “if I don’t build it, someone else will,” and argues technology should expand human and planetary capacity, with control and responsibility staying with people. His advice for new designers: deep domain expertise in fields like finance or medtech will matter more than being a generalist, because designers will help tune, train and judge models. And adaptability is no longer a nice-to-have. It’s survival.