Educational leadership increasingly operates under conditions of uncertainty, ambiguity, and competing demands. The rapid emergence of artificial intelligence (AI) in education intensifies these challenges, requiring school leaders to navigate tensions between innovation and ethics, autonomy and regulation, and professional judgment and accountability. This study examines AI integration primarily through the lens of educational leadership, proposing that leadership not only shapes teachers’ perceptions of AI but also strengthens the translation of those perceptions into practice. Drawing on transformational leadership theory and technology acceptance models (TAM; UTAUT2), the study tests an integrative model in which teachers’ perceptions of AI function as proximal predictors of use, while transformational leadership serves as a contextual moderator. Data were collected from 141 teachers and analyzed using correlational and regression-based moderation analyses. Findings indicate that transformational leadership significantly predicts teachers’ perceptions of AI and strengthens the relationship between perceptions and AI use. While leadership does not directly predict AI use once perceptions are accounted for, it plays a critical role in enabling the enactment of professional beliefs in instructional practice. These findings position school leadership as a central factor in understanding AI integration, highlighting leadership’s role as a contextual enabler of educational innovation.
Yehudit Chassida (2026) studied this question.