As Chairman of Persatuan Aeroangkasa Myaerosatu, I noticed nearly four years after the main-stream arrival of generative artificial intelligence (AI), the dominant narrative has focused on job displacement: which roles will disappear, which will survive, and which new ones will emerge. This framing is intuitive, but incomplete. The real impact of AI is not primarily about eliminating jobs. It is redefining them. AI is transforming work at the level of tasks, not roles. In is unbundling jobs into their component parts, automating some augmenting others, and leaving a smaller but more critical subset firmly in human hands. In doing so, it is quietly reshaping the nature of human contribution at work. The implication is not that humans are becoming obsolete, but that the bar for what constitutes valuable human input is rising. This shift has profound consequences for leadership, talent and the broader labor market.
I have observed in the aviation industry, employees are frequently doing the same work as before, only faster or with less effort. Crucially, the time saved is rarely reinvested in higher-value activities. This is not productivity revolution. It is, at best, a more efficient version of the status quo. At worst, it is what one might call performative productivity, where the appearance of progress substitutes for actual value creation. The underlying issue is that most aviation organizations have not redesigned work. They have merely layered AI onto existing processes rather than rethinking those processes from first principles.
As the legendary management guru, Dr. Peter Drucker famously observed, there is nothing so useless as doing efficiently what should not be done at all. AI risks amplifying precisely this problem, enabling organizations to do more of the wrong things. This is where modern leadership becomes most critical.
If AI is the defining technological challenge, then leadership is the defining organizational challenge. Leaders must decide not only how to deploy AI, but what work should exist in the first place. They must move beyond adoption metrics and focus on value creation, and the importance of human judgment.
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