The Five-Year Century Recognized as National Bestseller, Signaling Demand for a New Leadership Playbook in the Age of AI

Most organizations are trying to use AI while still operating with assumptions around work that were built for another era: change should be incremental, hierarchy creates control, jobs should be standardized, and humans must adapt to technology. The Five-Year Century: Bold Leadership and Accelerated Outcomes in the Age of AI argues that those assumptions are holding leaders back from delivering meaningful transformation.

Written by Automation Anywhere Chairman and CEO Mihir Shukla and Chief People Experience Officer Nancy Hauge, The Five-Year Century has been named a National Bestseller on the USA Today bestseller list, underscoring the growing demand for a more practical leadership playbook for the AI era. The Five-Year Century argues that demographic decline, productivity stagnation, and AI acceleration are converging to create a compressed period of transformation — one in which the next five years will deliver a century’s worth of change.

“Over the past year, we’ve been part of billions of conversations about what AI will mean for work — we’ve spoken with a network of customers that extends across 90 countries, heads of state, enterprise leaders, labor leaders, HR teams, educators, students, employees leading this revolution and employees worried about what comes next,” said Mihir Shukla. “The question is, how will you lead in the five-year century? Will you use AI to preserve old systems or use it to build new ways of working that deliver better outcomes for people, businesses and society?”

The book identifies four illusions holding organizations back: the illusion of incremental change, the illusion of human-only work, the illusion of hierarchical control, and the illusion of technology servitude. Each illusion is wrapped with a leadership playbook that pushes readers to ask sharper questions: What work should still be human? Where can AI agents remove friction? How can the operating model be redesigned around outcomes instead of functions? How can leaders build trust in AI as work changes faster than most organizations were designed to handle?

“The response to the book tells us this conversation is hitting a nerve,” said Nancy Hauge. “People don’t want another abstract debate about whether AI is good or bad. They want to know how to lead through it, how to protect what makes us human, and how to build workplaces where people are not trapped doing machine work that AI can handle directly.”

Business leaders are under growing pressure to move beyond AI pilots and deliver measurable, scalable business value. Jeff Immelt, former Chairman and CEO of GE and author of Hot Seat, said The Five-Year Century gives leaders “the confidence, playbook and urgency to succeed in the AI economy.”

At its core, the book frames AI transformation as a choice about how work should evolve. Organizations can use AI to reinforce existing models, or they can use it to rethink how people, technology, and leadership come together to create better outcomes.