Teaching Human Judgment in AI Leadership

• Teaching AI to future leaders means preparing them to recognize when AI creates value—and when it causes harm.
• Empathy, communication, and active listening are among the hardest skills to teach, yet they remain the most essential in an AI-driven workplace.
• AI serves as both a creative collaborator and a predictive tool, enhancing innovation and helping organizations anticipate and adapt to change.

Transcript

Susan Christoffersen: [00:13] AI, you know, there are many risks that are associated with it, and there’s a responsibility for us, as a business school, in terms of how we train it.

[00:23] I think there are two really important issues here. One is about the judgment we’re teaching our students, as well as the human skills they need.

[00:33] So, enhancing human skills in terms of how people interact with AI, but also, how they’re interacting with one another as humans.

[00:42] And we need to, if we want AI to be beneficial within our society, we really need to enhance our ability to pass judgment on whether the AI is really enhancing the societal values we wanna see enhanced, or is it harming them.

[01:03] We want responsible leaders who are out there. Teaching that in our classrooms will become more important as leaders are gonna be relying on and using these different tools in different parts of their businesses.

If we want AI to be beneficial within our society, we really need to enhance our ability to pass judgment on whether the AI is really enhancing societal values.

[01:15] Many of the students that we’re trying to train now, we have a self-development lab where we’re really working on the interpersonal skills with them and their leadership skills, and really building out the ability to be empathetic, to listen, and to have some of those human skills, which I think will make them valuable within the workplace.

[01:35] Students tend to focus on the technical skills because they’re comfortable there. Some of the softer skills are actually hard skills to acquire; they’re hard skills to teach.

[01:46] And we’ve actually found that the way we can actually teach some of these softer human skills is through one-on-one feedback.

[01:55] And that’s really what the self-development lab is trying to focus on, which is providing that feedback in terms of how you present yourself.

[02:03] How are you articulating your views? Are you listening? Even your body language and giving people that one-on-one feedback has really enhanced their ability to communicate.

[02:14] The human aspect is very important because we want to enhance human skills and students so they can still communicate, negotiate, and be empathetic to the people around them.

Some of the softer skills are actually hard skills to acquire; they’re hard skills to teach.

[02:31] Because those skills, I think, are going to make us more human and help us evaluate whether the AI is adding the value we want and enhancing our world.

[02:44] I think of AI as really helping to expand our ability to be creative and innovative.

[02:50] If you can think of when you’re brainstorming different ideas, and you really want to think about, you know, bouncing things off of people, different ideas, I think AI can help you do that.

[03:02] You sort of throw out, ‘I want to learn about such-and-such,’ and that can actually twig different ways and ways in which you want to explore.

[03:10] From that perspective, it can really help build and increase innovation. I believe AI is really going to be critical for many organizations to remain resilient in the days to come.

[03:22] AI is really a predictive tool to help see into the future. I think just in that light, you can use it in many different ways.

AI is really going to be critical for many organizations to remain resilient in the days to come.

[03:30] You can look at customer demand. How is that shifting? It’s going to be able to better predict what kind of patterns we might not right now be able to predict.

[03:41] I think for organizations, this will help them adapt to changing markets and landscapes—financially and customer-based—and to how preferences might be shifting within the marketplace.

[03:56] But there’s also a flip side to this that I would add.

[04:01] It’s not just that AI is going to help the organization become resilient, but it’s also that resilience and adaptability within the organization are going to help it better bring AI into use.

[04:12] So, it’s actually something that goes both ways.