Keeping it human in the age of AI

By Carlos Rodriguez-Lluesma

From the Americas to Europe to Asia, we see a similar trend emerging: cautious labor markets, shaped by geopolitical uncertainty and, by many accounts, the adoption of AI to augment human work or to do jobs that people once did. Delegating to a machine what it can do better than a person may sometimes make business sense, but the bigger question that responsible business leaders should be asking is: How do we preserve and promote that which is uniquely human in the midst of this changing environment?

This has been the focus of our attention at IESE Business School over the past year, above all at our Dignity at Work conference. We highlight some of the key takeaways in this special report.

Giulio Maspero and Ilaria Vigorelli, experts in relational ontology who spoke at the conference, offered a useful image for how we should approach these changes: as limen, a threshold or doorway leading to greater human dignity and worth, rather than as limes, a barrier that limits agency and contradicts people’s dignity and worth.

Are you, as a leader, opening or closing opportunities for people to express their humanity at work? Do you feel your own dignity and the meaning you derive from your work being amplified or reduced? The report offers practical frameworks for answering both questions and for acting on the answers.

The task for each of us is to orient our organizations toward protecting human capabilities. A limes becomes limen when we honor the inherent relational character of work and design it so that it may foster human flourishing.

The same obligation reaches beyond the workplace. Arrangements that blur the line between work and home life, as remote work often does, leave people little room to be anything other than workers. Yet “unproductive” time has its own worth — and not just as an investment in later performance. Dignified work presupposes a life that is not simply work, and protecting that life is a task for those who design the work, not only for those who do it.

How the future of work plays out depends, in Pope Leo XIV’s framing, on which of two alternative building projects we take up. His encyclical, Magnifica Humanitas, on safeguarding the human person in the time of artificial intelligence, which we also discuss in this report, sets the story of the Tower of Babel against the rebuilding of Jerusalem under Nehemiah in the 5th century B.C. On one side, a single language, a single technology and a single-minded endeavor of people building a name for themselves; on the other, a governor who gathered people, assigned them a section to rebuild, listened to their concerns, coordinated their efforts and addressed any opposition. Nehemiah’s approach lies at the heart of our argument. By choosing the “way of Nehemiah,” as the Pope recommends, we are choosing to put “the human person at the center of our choices.”

At IESE, this is our shared desire. Our doorway (limen) is open. We commend this report to our readers in the hope that your doorway remains open, too.