That idea of judgment in the age of AI was a central tenet of the work of our late colleague and visionary friend Alessandro Di Fiore. Alessandro believed in putting humans at the center and considered technology to be a way to help people augment their creativity, autonomy, and critical thinking. As a frequent contributor to HBR (and the former chairman of Harvard Business Review Italia) he often reflected on how innovation, leadership, and AI went hand in hand. And in this 2018 article, he argued that as AI gets more accessible to all employees, judgment would become as crucial as any technical skill.

Alessandro argued that judgment will be the real competitive advantage for organizations as AI systems rise to new common operating standards. But reinforcing skills alone won’t develop better judgment. Companies will need to radically rethink how they view and deploy judgment in order to adapt to the pace of change. Significantly, Alessandro saw three critical facets of judgment as crucial to this moment: 

Access

This speaks to the idea of who has the authority or permission to exercise judgment.  As an early advocate of democratization of judgment, Alessandro knew that making good decisions was not something confined to the C-suite. As knowledge, data and technologies are more widely distributed, judgment must also be more widely distributed.

Companies need to understand how to leverage and scale generative AI, and trying to prohibit that access will ultimately be a futile effort. Making sure your workers have access to all the ways they can unlock the value in these tools is part of the transformation, of course doing so in a secure and controlled manner. This requires trust and communication. But leaders should consider that an increasing number of new use cases and practices are bound to emerge bottom up rather than stirred top down.

Exercise of Judgment

This speaks to the act or process of deciding or forming an opinion. Alessandro considered judgment as a continuous process rather than a single moment:

Judgment is not only exercised in the moment of making a decision assessing data and information. Judgment is broader than that and it starts with asking the right questions, framing the right problem, evaluating the broader context. Judgment is co-creative, it’s a journey.

This concept of judgment is even more true today. The rise of generative AI expands judgment beyond discrete decisions — it’s now a collaborative human-machine process.

With AI chatbots, the significance of contextual interactions is evident. Judgment emerges through integrated human-AI dialogue, not separated spheres. Our recent ChatGPT experiment on how generative AI can enhance 10 popular management practices is a case in point. In a meaningful dialogue with ChatGPT, we had to exercise our judgment ability before, during, and after the prompting, inputting the right context, crafting the best chain of prompts, and carefully interpreting recommendations.

The experiment confirmed Alessandro’s intuition: the ideal outcomes arise at the intersection of human and machine intelligence. Sound judgment’s future is this symbiotic co-creation process. Such a shift mandates a comprehensive people transformation and reskilling, arming workers with the judgment prowess essential for the AI era.