Beyond the hype: Building real leadership in the age of AI
WEEKLY BLOG
By Neha Taneja and Anand Laxshmivarahan R
7/16/20264 min read
Beyond the hype: Building real leadership in the age of AI
Ambitious companies often mistake energy for substance in their operations. AI adoption amplifies this trend, creating visible excitement without clear outcomes. True leadership requires defining success with measurable business results. Vision provides a sustainable foundation for energy and momentum. Indian leaders must prioritize tangible value over mere visibility in AI initiatives.
This is the first of a five-week series exploring what leadership looks like when artificial intelligence has made speed cheap and judgment scarce. The series draws on ideas from Bytes and Breaths - The VitaSphere Quest, a leadership parable by Neha Taneja and Anand Laxshmivarahan.R that examines the intersection of AI adoption, emotional intelligence, and sustainable leadership through the journey of a Startup founder building an AI-powered wellness company. Each week takes one idea from that intersection and tests it against the realities leaders are facing right now, starting with vision, because everything else depends on it.
Everyone has the vibe, but do they have the vision?
Walk into any growth-stage company today and the energy is unmistakable from the moment you enter the building. Stand-up meetings move fast, Slack channels buzz around the clock, and leadership decks tend to open with AI-first taglines before closing with bold, often inflated, ambition. The office itself often looks the part too, with open floor plans, recreational corners, and a pervasive sense of forward momentum that is genuinely hard to manufacture and easy to mistake for substance.
This is vibe leadership, and it has become close to the default operating mode for ambitious companies right now. It is not fake, and it is certainly not without value, because energy and momentum genuinely matter, and a team that feels good about where it is heading will almost always outperform one that does not. But vibe, taken on its own, is not a strategy in any meaningful sense. It is an output rather than an input, and increasingly, companies are mistaking that output for the engine that is supposed to produce it.
The danger is not that vibe leadership exists, since some version of it probably always will in fast-moving organisations. The real danger is that it has quietly become a substitute for vision, particularly in how AI is being adopted across enterprises today. AI happens to be the perfect vibe amplifier, because it is visible, fast, and easy to demonstrate in a single town hall. A leadership team can announce an AI initiative, generate genuine excitement, and create real momentum within the space of one meeting. What is far harder to demonstrate, and considerably less photogenic, is whether that initiative is solving a business problem that actually matters, building a capability that compounds over time, or simply adding noise to an organisation that already has plenty of it. In our book, this tension plays out almost literally, when a rival company floods the market with loud AI-first messaging and aggressive pricing, winning headlines and attention well before it has proven that any of it adds durable value.
We believe this distinction matters more in India than it might elsewhere, for a fairly specific reason. Many Indian enterprises are moving from a services and execution mindset toward genuine product and platform thinking, often for the first time at any real scale, and that transition rewards vision over visibility. It demands the discipline of asking what outcome you are actually building toward, and what evidence would tell you honestly that you are on the right path, rather than simply on an energetic one. Vibe, left unchecked, tends to reward whatever looks impressive in a leadership offsite or a LinkedIn post, regardless of whether it moves the metrics that the business actually depends on.
Leaders who get this right are rarely the ones suppressing energy or stamping out enthusiasm in their teams. They are the ones who consistently ask a harder question before any initiative gets greenlit, which is what success will actually look like in twelve months, expressed in numbers that matter to the business rather than sentiment that simply feels good in the room. They are willing to sit with the discomfort of saying no to a high-energy idea that lacks a clear outcome, even when saying yes would be the easier and more popular choice in front of a watching team. The book's protagonist learns this distinction the hard way, discovering that the version of her company that looked most impressive from the outside was not always the version that was actually getting stronger underneath. This shows in the book’s MediAssure crisis, where a major insurance partnership built to bring VitaSphere’s products to over two million customers collapses overnight, even as the company’s outward narrative of unicorn ambition stays intact. The gap between the two, what investors saw on the surface and what was actually failing underneath, is exactly where vibe and vision part ways.
This is not a call to abandon vibe altogether, since that would be neither realistic nor useful for any organisation trying to move fast. It is, instead, a call to anchor it properly. The most effective leaders we have experienced tend to build vision first and let vibe follow from it, rather than working the other way round. When a team understands precisely what it is building toward and why that goal matters, energy becomes sustainable rather than performative, and it tends to survive the first real setback, the first funding winter, or the first quarter that does not go to plan. Vibe without vision, by contrast, tends to collapse rather quickly the moment reality intrudes on it.
For Indian leaders navigating the AI era specifically, the practical test is reasonably simple to apply. Before adopting any AI initiative, it is worth asking whether you could explain, in a single sentence, the business outcome it is meant to produce, and whether you would still pursue it if no one outside the company ever found out you had done it at all. If the honest answer leans toward visibility over value, that is a signal worth pausing on before committing further resources.
Next week, we look at why AI itself has become the loudest vibe signal in Indian enterprise today, and why loud AI adoption and deep AI integration remain very different things in practice.
Disclaimer: This feature presents insights and reflections drawn from individual experiences, and is extracted from ‘Bytes and Breaths - The Vitasphere Quest” by the authors Neha Taneja, and Anand Laxshmivarahan.R. The views expressed are their own and should not be attributed to or considered representative of any organizations, employers or institutions that they currently or have previously been associated with. ETCIO is not responsible for any of the views expressed here.
