Judgment: Powering Leadership in the Age of AI

Artificial intelligence is rapidly taking hold in organizations, changing the way companies build products, run operations, and create value. Many leaders have been quick to assure employees and other stakeholders that AI won’t replace people. It will, however, expose whether companies have the right people in the right roles.

As AI becomes more powerful, the differentiator will not be the technology itself but the quality of the human judgment behind it – this applies to boards of directors, executive committees and the rest of the organization alike. Organizations that thrive will be the ones that can pair AI tools with leaders who know how to interpret, challenge and apply them appropriately. This is the essence of what might be called symbiotic intelligence: a model in which AI is designed not to replace human capability, but to extend it—making people more effective, more insightful, and more consequential in their decisions.

This is particularly true when it comes to talent. AI is not a replacement for human judgment; it’s an enabler and amplifier. It can accelerate the candidate hiring process, but it can’t determine potential, assess character under pressure or understand nuances of career inflection points. That leaves people leaders with a fundamental question: How do we hire, develop, and retain talent in a world where technology accelerates everything?

It starts with a dose of reality. AI has not yet transformed industries at scale—Egon Zehnder’s survey of tech leaders found that two-thirds of their organizations are still piloting or launching early AI projects. However, emerging evidence suggests that these experiments may soon start to pay off with tangible results. A few domains, such as coding, are already showing strong impact, since large language models are trained on vast amounts of public code. In these areas, elements of cognitive intelligence—pattern recognition, synthesis, recall—are increasingly able to be built by AI. But in many functions, the bottleneck is not the AI models but the systems, behaviors and decisions around them, which brings us back to the importance of people.

AI shines in transactions, processing massive amounts of information and optimizing the outputs. But most organizations don’t survive on transactions alone but on relationships and interpretation. This is where the value of human skills really shine through in areas such as:

• Sensing: intuiting context and needs
• Judgment: deciding what “good” looks like
• Purpose: understanding why the work matters

These abilities help people interpret ambiguous situations, evaluate tradeoffs with imperfect information, and align decisions within organizational contexts and cultures. Even institutions operating at the frontier of AI adoption rely on hiring processes that prioritize genuine human interaction to understand who someone is and not just what they can do. As many leadership conversations now reflect, the scarcest capability in an AI‑saturated environment is not access to better information, but the judgment to interpret it, especially when the stakes are high and the signals are incomplete.

AI is a force multiplier, enabling small teams to achieve levels of impact that were once unthinkable. This dynamic makes talent density (i.e., the concentration of exceptional people within a team) a decisive differentiator. Organizations that succeed in the AI era will not necessarily be the ones that hire the most people, but rather those that assemble teams of individuals capable of leveraging AI effectively.

However, hiring can’t be reduced to an algorithm. It must be meaningful and not automated. A rigorous selection and assessment process with in‑depth reference checks ensures a candidate’s technical expertise and sense of purpose. This kind of intentional talent cultivation creates environments where ambitious ideas thrive and where collaboration becomes a source of competitive advantage. Framework conditions, speed of decision‑making, and access to interdisciplinary ecosystems matter significantly more than salary levels alone. The organizations that create clarity of purpose, enable autonomy, and encourage intelligent risk‑taking will be the ones that attract and keep the most promising people.

We are still at an early stage of the AI revolution. The most transformative effects will come not from automating isolated tasks, but from integrating AI deeply into the core of business operations. Leaders are beginning to recognize that competitive advantage will emerge from the ability to pair human expertise with AI in ways that fundamentally reshape how work gets done. Leaders increasingly ask:

• How do we integrate AI into operations and our identity as well?
• How do we reshape our roles and organization and purpose as we adapt?

The answer lies in combining human expertise with powerful AI models to transform entire workflows, not just tasks. Frontier initiatives, such as developing foundation models for health, climate science, and robotics, reveal how vertically integrated AI can unlock entirely new possibilities. Startups are already building browser-native agents capable of performing complex tasks autonomously, demonstrating how small teams can scale their impact dramatically. Platforms are now facilitating agent-to-agent collaboration, enabling native agents to perform complex tasks autonomously, demonstrating how small teams can scale their impact dramatically.

The next stage of AI will not just be who integrates the latest tools first but who builds the strongest leadership bench to fully leverage those tools. It will require leaders who deeply understand and delicately practice change management and who can sense fears and resistance, craft “ah-ha!” moments and curate experimentation successes that compel innovation. AI will reward organizations that adapt smartly, communicate transparently, and design systems with both human and technological strengths in mind.