As AI transforms the hospitality industry, Dr. Sowon Kim, EHL professor and founder of the Women in Leadership (WIL) Initiative, makes the case that the most vital leadership skills remain deeply human. With over two decades of experience across cultures and industries, she emphasizes that self awareness, ethical grounding, trust-building, and investing in people are the qualities that truly distinguish great leaders.
A Cross-Cultural Path to Leadership
Dr. Kim’s career spans eight countries and multiple industries, with academic positions at some of the world’s most prestigious institutions: IESE Business School, INSEAD Fontainebleau, and the University of Geneva, where she earned her PhD in Management. Working alongside leaders of vastly different cultures led her to a question that has become the central thread of her work.
“Some people are more effective than others in inspiring people and in leading organizations. The question of what makes people trust some leaders more than others to follow them beyond hierarchy or a paycheck has never been more relevant than it is today.”
Founding WIL: From a Corridor to a Movement
Dr. Kim’s 2018 walk through the corridors of EHL’s Lausanne campus sparked the WIL Initiative as she observed the walls were lined with large portraits of successful alumni, all of them male. At the time, 60 percent of EHL’s student body was female, and the disconnect was stark. “If you aspire to become a leader, you must have role models that look like you as a starting point.”
WIL now reaches 2000 people annually through leadership workshops, a rotational mentoring program, a Sexual Harassment Prevention initiative, and its flagship WIL Day held each year around International Women’s Day. The statistics that motivated it remain sobering: gender parity at entry level erodes to roughly 30 percent by mid-management, and between 5 and 10 percent at the top. “The gender gap is wide because the organizational system is biased,” Dr. Kim states plainly. WIL focuses on building agency and relationships to navigate the system. “At the core, leadership is about relationships.”
Leadership in the AI age
The prevailing narrative holds that AI is making leadership harder. Dr. Kim offers a more nuanced take: “Leadership isn’t harder. It’s always been extremely hard. But it’s more visible, because AI is more human like than the Industrial Revolution or the digital age that preceded it.”
A 2024 Harvard Business Review experiment found that AI significantly outperformed human executives in strategic decision-making, though it faltered when faced with unpredictable disruptions. A 2025 survey of 500 global CEOs found that 94 percent believe AI could offer better counsel than at least one of their board members. Kazakhstan’s sovereign wealth fund went as far as appointing an AI system (SKAI) as a digital board member with advisory rights – a signal of just how seriously organizations are beginning to take the question.
Social media and digital transparency are also compounding the visibility effect. Leaders are, as Dr Kim puts it, “under the loop”. Leadership is no longer confined to private dysfunction within an organization – it’s shareable, and consequential in real time. In the same vein, inspiring leadership can, and does, travel further and faster than ever.
EQ and CQ: The skills that get amplified
Dr. Kim’s published research shows that even genuinely supportive leadership behavior does not land the same way for every employee, and that the same action tells a different story depending on motivation and cultural context. AI can observe behavior. It cannot read intention, decode intertwined cultural contexts, or sense when the same gesture will resonate with one person and alienate another.
She draws a sharp distinction between simulation and relationship. AI can mimic EQ’s surface expressions but emotional intelligence runs far deeper than expression alone.
“AI performs some EQ tasks; as a trainer it has endless patience, as a customer agent it can seem remarkably empathetic. But in both cases, it is reacting. Reciprocity, by contrast, is mutual and self-initiated, and through that exchange something larger emerges: a sense of belonging to a shared purpose. Every connection a leader makes has the potential to ripple outward in ways no AI-initiated interaction can replicate.”
Strategic thinking and decision-making matter. But emotional and cultural intelligence are what make those capabilities land within a team, across an organization, and between cultures. As AI takes on more of the task work, the gap between what it can simulate and what a leader actually delivers becomes uncomfortably narrow for those who cannot demonstrate them.
AI: The Culture Amplifier
Dr. Kim views AI as a ‘cultural amplifier’ that accelerates a company’s existing culture. In a supportive culture, AI boosts synergy and engagement, while in a toxic culture, it becomes “an instrumentalization of the human.”
Leaders must recognize AI’s potential to scale up existing values, good or bad. The biggest mistake organizations make is neglecting the human side of AI adoption – the questions of ethics, accountability, and transparency. “The technology goes so fast, but the whole skill set that goes together with it is not there yet”, Dr. Kim says.
Navigating Change with Humanity
Dr. Kim’s advice to leaders feeling overwhelmed by the pace of change is disarmingly direct: slow down. “Chronic stress spills over to others, and that path leads to burnout.” The priority, she argues, is to reflect on what change matters most and act from there.
Most change initiatives fail because of leadership shortcomings, specifically, the failure to account for the human side of adoption. Failures are not technical but relational and emotional such as trust and power issues. A leader who understands this, communicates a compelling vision, and gives people the capabilities to adapt is far more likely to bring their organization through any transition successfully.
Success is about Happiness and Impact
Dr. Kim defines success as how happy the people she cares about are and how happy she is. “Happiness is not a destination. It’s part of the journey,” she says. For her, success is about making an impact and adding value to people.
There is no doubt that the machines will keep getting smarter. The question, as Dr. Kim highlights, is whether leadership will be more human at the same rate.
Founded in Lausanne in 1893, EHL Hospitality Business School is the world’s oldest hospitality management school and has held the number one position in the QS World University Rankings for Hospitality & Leisure Management for eight consecutive years. Today, it welcomes over 4,000 students from more than 120 nationalities across campuses in Lausanne, Passugg, and Singapore, with human interaction and business acumen at the heart of its educational model.