So Where Does Your Judgment Come From in the AI Era?
23 Oct 2026
Hand the work to AI, keep the judgment.
Hand the work to AI, keep the judgment.
That advice is everywhere. It has one flaw. Where do you think the judgment came from?
Nobody gave it to you. You built it by doing the work. The drafts, the numbers, the thing you got wrong once and learnt the lesson.
Much of that is now moving to AI.
This morning in Zurich I put that question to a room of students and corporate leaders, at the Business-Academia Hackathon of UZH.ai
I loved the challenging questions (grill!) and the discussions we had. All this, after a great keynote from Lauren Howe on future scenarios with AI.
Thank you Nick Kabrel, Peter Nestorov and the UZH.ai team for the invitation. And thanks Syngenta team for the great chat Bettina Weber, Dave Drodge and Violaine Delli.
Where did yours come from?
Why I keep asking this question in every room I speak to
I ask this question at almost every keynote now, because the answer changes depending on who is in the room. Students about to start their careers give a different answer than the directors who have been doing the work for twenty years.
The directors always say the same thing: judgment came from the mistakes nobody saw, the draft that got rejected three times, the number that did not add up until they found why. None of that happened on a stage. It happened alone, usually under some pressure, long before anyone was watching.
That is the part AI is quietly taking over. Not the big decisions, the small repeated ones: the first draft, the first pass at the numbers, the first guess at what the client actually wants. Those small reps are where judgment gets built. If AI does all of them, a 25-year-old today may reach 35 with far less of that muscle than I had at the same age.
→ Ask one question before you hand a task to AI: am I removing effort, or am I removing a rep I still need?
→ For anyone leading a team, build back the reps on purpose. Have someone write the first draft by hand before the AI version, even once a week.
→ For your own career, keep at least one part of your job where you still do the slow version.
This is the same tension I wrote about in what changes when you build your own AI perspective: the leaders who stay sharp with AI are the ones who keep doing some of the thinking themselves, not just reviewing what the tool produced.
If this question stays with you, I have a free AI Coach Tünde Light tool, a short set of self-coaching prompts that help you reflect on your own decisions instead of outsourcing them. Leave your email here and I will send it over: https://www.thechangerepublic.com/free-resources