Leading in a world where information is no longer a privilege
AI isn't just changing the way people work. It redistributes power at the heart of organizations. When information and analysis are no longer reserved for the top, the role of the leader is put under stress. This article deciphers a change that is already under way and asks a key question: how to exercise leadership when the information advantage disappears?
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Why leaders need to rethink their role before the organization overtakes them
Over the past eighteen months, the massive emergence of generative AI has sparked debates about productivity, jobs, and even the survival of humanity. But a much more immediate, more discreet (and more explosive) challenge is playing out today at the very heart of businesses: the redistribution of information power.
Historically, the authority of leaders was based on a simple reality:
💡 Those who have the information have the power.
Comex and the Board were the only bodies capable of accessing a global vision, consolidating weak signals and synthesizing complexity. It was this informational superiority, more than status, that legitimized their decision-making role.
This balance, which is centuries old, is in the process of wavering.
1. The end of the information advantage: an already observable break
Generative AI sharply reduces the gap between managers and operational staff.
A 25-year-old employee, equipped with a powerful conversational agent and adequate internal data, can now:
- analyze a market in a few minutes,
- produce a summary note or a strategic scenario,
- model an action plan,
- identify risks, inconsistencies or weak signals,
- compare the company to its peers,
and generate recommendations that were formerly given to senior consultants.
➡️ In 2024, a BCG study showed that AI significantly equates the analytical capacity of juniors with that of experienced managers on complex tasks.
➡️ Field teams often have data fresher, more contextual, more reliable than those that go back to executive committees, but their capacity for analysis is limited.
That is no longer the case.
Information power, which has been concentrated for a long time, is becoming distributed.
2. A forgotten truth: leaders never had access to the reality on the ground
Twenty years ago, during my MBA at @Dauphine —UQAM, a professor summed up a fundamental management paradox in one sentence: “By definition, the CEO is the person who is least informed about what is really going on in his company.”
Not because of a lack of skill or attention, but because Information is filtered in a cascade :
- teams solve a lot of problems before they come back up,
- middle managers smooth out, reinterpret or delay certain signals,
- each stratum reformulates, aggregates and simplifies,
- the summit receives a vision that is late, filtered and often too synthetic.
To meet this challenge, companies have massively deployed ERP in the years 90—2000.
But ERPs have their own limitations:
- they only show what was seized,
- their data model is rigid,
- consolidation is slow,
- quality depends on manual processes (Excel, ad hoc reporting),
- reading them is complex for managers.
➡️ The CEO has never lacked authority.
➡️ He always lacked immediate visibility.
However, conversational AI is radically changing this paradigm.
If - and only if - data is well organized, governed, and available, AI allows managers to:
- to directly access field information,
- to question the company as a living system,
- to navigate from strategic to operational,
- to obtain a reliable synthesis in a few seconds.
For the first time, the summit latency could become less than the field latency.
3. When AI meets organization: a governance model put under pressure
The book Reshuffle by Sangeet Paul Choudary mentions it in chapter 3: what was once concentrated at the top (analysis, synthesis, projection) is becoming accessible to all.
Agile organizations adapt:
- Decision closer to the ground,
- informed autonomy,
- smooth flow of information,
- clear rules of governance to avoid chaos.
On the other hand, rigid organizations face a well-documented phenomenon:
👉 the inability of the summit to keep pace with better informed units.
This is where the first power fractures were born.
4. A Marxist reading: AI as a new “means of production”
In Marxist thought, the ruling class is the one that controls the means of production.
- In the 20th century: the machine.
- In the 21st century: information.
The parallel is striking: AI gives each employee a cognitive tool as powerful as that of the manager.
It is not a simple technical advance, it is a structural leveling :
- analytical capacity is shared,
- learning is accelerated,
- the creation of knowledge becomes collective,
- hierarchy loses its monopoly on synthesis.
In the knowledge economy, information capital ceases to be a privilege.
5. The real immediate risk: not AGI, but management disintermediation
The debates on an omnipotent AGI distract us from the immediate issue.
The real threat is the loss of relevance of hierarchical layers Who:
- no longer control information,
- sometimes don't know AI tools,
- don't necessarily understand data dynamics
- and see better equipped teams act faster than they do.
In some businesses, we are already seeing:
- a circumvention of middle management,
- decisions taken de facto by the operational staff,
- managers briefed by summaries generated by AI (LLM notebook or Copilot),
- a cultural gap between hyper-equipped young talent and poorly acculturated leaders.
The coup is not technological. He is both informational, organizational and generational.
6. Plausible scenarios for the next three years
🟢 Scenario 1 — Augmented Governance: Strengthened Leadership
Governed data, internal sovereign AI, traceable decisions, reacculturated leaders.
➡️ Leadership is transformed, not weakened.
🟡 Scenario 2 — Information Anarchy
Each team uses AI without a framework.
➡️ Multiplication of the versions of the truth.
🔴 Scenario 3 — Operational empowerment
The field has better information than the Comex.
➡️ De facto decisions taken elsewhere.
7. Restoring legitimacy: the new role of leaders
The answer is neither restriction nor excessive control: these strategies always fail. Leaders must shift their legitimacy to three key areas:
The orchestration of governance : Create the rules of the AI game: access, quality, authorizations, auditability, responsibilities.
Strategic and ethical interpretation : AI analyzes. The leader guides, arbitrates, gives meaning and assumes risks.
Control of extra-financial data :Core of sustainable value: ESG risks, value chain, resilience, reputation, compliance.
Even today, these data are:
- scattered,
- poorly governed,
- consolidated too slowly,
- insufficiently usable for Comex and Boards.
They require a new, modern and sovereign infrastructure, adapted to strategic management.
8. Why this transformation calls for a new infrastructure (and why ASCEND Tech is responding to it)
Current decision-making systems are based on 20th-century logics: silos, manual reporting, slow consolidation, partial information.
In a world where AI accelerates everything, this model is becoming unsustainable.
The next power battle is not about economic models.
It is based on the quality of governance, data and tools used to decide.
ASCEND Tech offers an answer to this new world: a sovereign infrastructure to govern extra-financial data, structure decision-making and give managers direct visibility into operational reality.
To conclude, I am convinced that AI will not subvert power within the company.
But a company can overthrow its own managers if they remain trapped in a model where value comes from privileged access to information.
We are entering an era where:
- information is distributed,
- the analysis can be automated,
- the implementation is decentralized,
- buts governance is not.
The role of leadership is no longer to have information.
It's creating the conditions for the entire organization to use it. without losing its coherence, ethics or direction.
AI has already redistributed the power of execution.
It is now up to leaders to restore (or reinvent) decision-making power.