Teacher Leadership in the Age of Artificial Intelligence: A Systematic Review of Styles, Challenges, and Transformations (1990-2025)

The rapid integration of artificial intelligence (AI) into education is profoundly redefining the role and practices of the teacher, challenging the traditional frameworks of teacher leadership. The literature in this emerging area is vast, fragmented and evolving at an accelerated pace, making it difficult to identify the intellectual structure, main trends, and future research directions. To address this gap, this study conducts the first comprehensive bibliometric analysis of the international scientific corpus on teacher leadership in the age of AI. The paper analyses 618 articles and scientific journals indexed in the Web of Science, published between 1990 and 2025. Performance, co-citation, keyword co-occurrence, and collaboration analyses are conducted using the Bibliometrix R package and VOSviewer. The study aims to map the evolution, structure, and boundaries of the field, answering key questions about the main actors, the conceptual core, and thematic transitions. The results highlight an exponential growth of publications post-2020 and identify distinct thematic clusters: digital leadership and professional skills; ethics and challenges of AI; adaptive systems and personalized learning; and pedagogical transformation. The evolutionary analysis reveals three distinct stages: AI as a tool (until 2010), AI as a data-driven partner (2011-2019), and AI as a generative co-agent (2020-present). The main contribution of the article is to provide an objective scientific map of this interdisciplinary field, giving researchers a panoramic view to navigate the literature and identify strategic research opportunities. The results highlight the urgent need for professional development programmes that move from simple digital literacy to the development of complex competencies in ethical leadership and human-AI systems design in the educational environment.