By Kristin Moyer, Distinguished VP analyst at Gartner
AI is rapidly transforming the landscape of leadership development, and not always in ways organizations anticipate. As executives increasingly rely on AI to expand their own capacity, junior talent is losing access to realtime assignments, shadowing opportunities and handson experiences that once built foundational leadership capability. This emerging “experience starvation” threatens to shrink future leadership pipelines, as traditional task-based development is no longer enough to prepare earlycareer employees for the complexity, ambiguity and judgment required in modern leadership roles.
Yet within this disruption lies a powerful solution. AIdriven mentoring, delivered through GenAI simulators, is creating scalable, immersive environments that mirror realworld challenges. By using AI as a mentor, organizations can reverse the trend of experience starvation and gain competitive advantage through accelerated development, cost efficiency and improved performance. For CIOs and HR leaders, the imperative now is to identify the roles and scenarios where AI can meaningfully compress learning timelines and deploy GenAI simulators to build leadership readiness at scale. This approach strengthens the leadership pipeline while enabling organizations to fully harness AI for efficiency and sustained growth.
While AI as a mentor is especially transformative for junior talent, it also offers significant value for experienced employees seeking to develop new skills or maintain critical capabilities. Simulators as a training tool are not new, but what’s new is the ability to scale them across the entire workforce. Gartner predicts that by 2028, most employees will be trained and coached by AI when entering a new job, signaling a fundamental shift in how organizations will build talent and future leaders.
Implementing GenAI Simulators
To fully realize the potential of AI as a mentor, CIOs must take a structured and disciplined approach to prioritizing where these capabilities will have the greatest impact. The most effective path forward begins with ranking use cases through three lenses:
Impact which includes the degree to which AIdriven mentoring can improve business outcomes or performance
- Feasibility, which considers the ease of implementation based on available resources, data quality and technical constraints
- Scalability which considers the ability to extend the AIasmentor service across roles, teams and locations.
The systematic evaluation helps CIOs focus investments where AI can meaningfully accelerate development and deliver measurable value.
GenAI simulators sit at the center of this AIasmentor future, particularly for junior talent. While digital adoption platforms traditionally guide users through realtime application tasks, GenAI simulators take development a step further. Rather than showing employees how to perform actions, simulators allow them to practice the deeper cognitive and leadership behaviors such as problem solving, prioritization, negotiation, and crisis response that they will need on the job. This shift moves training from procedural proficiency to true capability building, preparing talent for the increasingly complex scenarios they will face in modern roles.
To maximize the effectiveness of GenAI simulators, CIOs should focus on three strategic actions. First, ensure simulations are built using domainspecific data to finetune simulation twins. This step is essential for generating realistic and contextually relevant environments that reflect the nuances of the organization’s industry, customer expectations and operational realities.
Second, partner with HR to curate a portfolio of highvalue scenarios includes creating branching storylines that enhance learning by presenting multifaceted challenges that require critical thinking and problem solving.
Finally, support multiuser simulation environments, enabling teams to practice collaboration, interpersonal communication and collective decision-making. This not only enhances individual capability but also builds the relational skills vital for effective leadership.