Artificial Intelligence as Leadership Support in Schools: A Conceptual Review of Human - AI Collaboration in School Leadership

Abstrak

The rapid development of artificial intelligence (AI), particularly generative AI and large language models, is reshaping how educational organizations process information, perform administrative tasks, and make decisions. While AI applications in teaching and learning have received substantial scholarly attention, its implications for school leadership require a conceptual understanding of how technological capabilities can complement rather than replace human leadership. This conceptual review examines the role of AI as leadership support in schools by synthesizing theoretical perspectives and recent international and national scholarship on artificial intelligence, educational leadership, digital transformation, and human–AI collaboration. The review employs a conceptual literature review approach in which relevant scholarly works were identified through targeted searches of academic databases and publisher platforms, selected based on their relevance to AI, school leadership, decision support, organizational management, and human judgment, and critically synthesized to develop an integrative conceptual framework. The synthesis identifies four interrelated dimensions of AI-supported school leadership: AI-enabled information and administrative support, decision and strategic planning support, instructional and organizational support, and human - AI collaborative judgment. The review further identifies three conditions that shape the usefulness of AI in leadership practice: leaders’ AI literacy, organizational and technological readiness, and ethical governance. The resulting framework positions AI as a leadership augmentation technology that extends leaders’ informational and cognitive capacity while retaining human responsibility for interpretation, contextualization, ethical judgment, and final decision-making. The study contributes a conceptual foundation for understanding AI-supported school leadership and provides a theoretical basis for subsequent empirical research examining how school principals integrate AI into everyday leadership practices.