Rethinking Digital Leadership in the Age of AI: Insights from European Cities

Digitalization processes are reshaping leadership paradigms worldwide. This topic is highly relevant given the contemporary, unprecedented evolution of digital technologies, particularly Artificial Intelligence (AI), which is transforming leadership approaches in urban areas where these processes are most accelerated. Many scholars predict that in the coming years, AI will play an increasingly pivotal role in the relationship between citizens and governing bodies. It is already observed that AI has the potential to influence the capacity of citizens to express their preferences, consequently impacting the evolving role of traditional political representation (König, 2022; Duberry 2022). However, the dynamics of this transformation at the local level remain underexplored, particularly regarding empirical research. Therefore, investigating the impact of AI on leadership is essential to deepen our understanding of the processes triggered by AI adoption across diverse institutional contexts (Ada Lovelace Institute, 2023). The aim of this paper is to examine how political and administrative leadership is redefined under the pressures and opportunities of digital transformation in European cities. This paper presents partial research results from the project “Artificial Intelligence in Urban Governance: Opportunities and Challenges for Citizen Participation. Experiences of Selected Cities in Europe", co-financed by the Polish National Science Centre. The study adopts an explanatory research design and is grounded in qualitative methodology, incorporating semi-structured interviews with digital leaders, public officials, academics, and private sector partners collaborating on urban AI transitions. Data were transcribed and coded using MAXQDA software, following collaborative coding procedures (Saldaña, 2013). Through a comparative case study of Amsterdam, Dublin, Helsinki, and London, the research addresses three key questions: RQ1: Does AI adoption exacerbate the crisis of political representation by deepening the deficit or offering new avenues for legitimacy in urban governance? RQ2: Does AI transform and redefine the role of leadership in selected cities, and if so, in what manner? RQ3: Who emerges as the definitive leader in the digital era: political decision-makers or administrative technocrats? The preliminary results highlight that leadership is not merely a product of individual vision or institutional mandates; instead, it is increasingly co-constructed through the interplay between administrative technocrats, expert networks, and technological systems, situated within evolving policy frameworks and shifting citizen expectations. Building on these case studies, the paper provides a formal definition of the evolving roles of both political decision-makers and administrative technocrats within the digital governance landscape.