The Leadership FOMO Nobody Names
Midnight 12 × 12 Wooden Panel
Anxiety about falling behind on AI is rarely about the technology. It's about what the technology seems to be encroaching on.
2 minute read
A recent Harvard Business Review study drawing on interviews with 35 CEOs and senior executives across global industries surfaced something worth sitting with: the sharpest anxiety about AI wasn't concentrated among people unfamiliar with it. It was concentrated among people whose authority had been built on deep expertise, the ones for whom "I know more than most people in this room" had always been part of how they led.
That's not a coincidence, and it's not really about AI. It's about identity.
What's actually being threatened
For someone whose value has always been "I have the answer," a tool that can generate a plausible answer in seconds doesn't feel like assistance. It feels like a direct challenge to the thing that made them valuable in the first place. Leaders rarely say this out loud. What they say instead is that the tool isn't accurate enough, or that their team isn't ready, or that governance needs to be sorted out first. Some of that is true. It's also, often, a story built to protect something underneath it.
One executive in that same research described watching peers race to announce AI initiatives before anyone had figured out what problem those initiatives solved. He called it leadership FOMO. The pressure wasn't coming from customers or competitors. It was coming from the fear of being caught visibly not knowing.
Knowing the most about AI isn't what gets a leader through this well. Being willing to say, out loud, "I'm still figuring this out," is.
Why this is the more useful conversation
Governance, tooling, and rollout plans matter. But none of them touch the actual thing keeping leaders up at night: if I don't have to be the smartest person in the room anymore, who am I in that room?
That question doesn't have a technical answer. It has a psychological one, and it's worth asking directly instead of dressing it up as a strategy problem. Leaders who handle this well don't hide the anxiety. They name it, usually to themselves first. And they tend to find, once they do, that the identity they were protecting was never actually where their value came from.
Source: Jazz Croft, Sumer Vaid, Lily Cheng, and Ashley Whillans, "Where Senior Leaders Are Struggling with AI Adoption, According to Research," Harvard Business Review, February 26, 2026.
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Keywords: AI anxiety for leaders, leadership identity, AI adoption challenges, executive psychology and AI
LinkedIn Version
A Harvard Business Review study based on interviews with 35 CEOs and senior executives found the sharpest anxiety about AI wasn't concentrated among people unfamiliar with it. It was concentrated among people whose authority had been built on deep expertise, the ones for whom "I know more than anyone in the room" had always been part of how they led.
That's not really about AI. It's about identity.
One executive called it leadership FOMO, watching peers race to announce AI initiatives before anyone knew what problem they solved. The pressure wasn't coming from competitors. It was coming from the fear of being caught visibly not knowing.
Knowing the most about AI isn't what gets a leader through this well. Being willing to say "I'm still figuring this out" is.
Source: Croft, Vaid, Cheng, and Whillans, Harvard Business Review, February 26, 2026.