Since the rapid rise of generative AI, judgment has made a remarkable comeback in managerial and professional discourse. One frequently hears that while AI can handle data, humans must retain responsibility for judgment.
The distinction sounds reassuring.
But what exactly do we mean by judgment? And are we paying enough attention to the forms of judgment that matter most in an increasingly AI-mediated world?
Not All Judgment Is the Same
A comprehensive review published in the Academy of Management Annals in 2024 by Tsoukas and colleagues, covering 474 studies, identifies three distinct perspectives on judgment.
The first, variance, approaches judgment as an evaluation of issues against reference points. It examines how judgments differ and what factors shape those differences.
The second, prediction, focuses on forecasting outcomes. Here, the central concern is improving accuracy, notably by identifying biases and using models to make more reliable predictions.
The third, practical wisdom, concerns our capacity to navigate complex, ambiguous, and often unique situations in which general rules and predefined procedures offer limited guidance. It involves not only knowledge and experience, but also values, character, and sensitivity to context.
These perspectives are not necessarily mutually exclusive.
Yet the review suggests that scholarly attention has concentrated primarily on the first two.
This is particularly significant in the age of AI, since these are arguably the forms of judgment that computational systems are best equipped to model, support, and increasingly automate.
The third perspective, practical wisdom, is both more elusive and, I would argue, more fundamentally human.
The Risk of Neglecting Practical Wisdom
In our rush to digitize decision-making, we may be overlooking precisely the form of judgment that deserves greater attention.
Practical wisdom cannot simply be reduced to processing information, applying rules, or optimizing predictions. It involves discerning what matters in a particular situation, recognizing tensions between competing goods, and deciding how to act when no formula can settle the matter.
This raises a question that receives surprisingly little attention in current discussions about AI:
💡How do we cultivate practical wisdom in organizations increasingly shaped by algorithmic systems?
The question is too complex to admit a simple answer. Nevertheless, several mutually reinforcing avenues seem particularly important.
First, fostering critical reflexivity. This means developing the capacity to question assumptions, examine complex dilemmas, and resist the temptation to embrace ready-made answers. Such reflexivity becomes especially important when AI systems provide apparently coherent responses with supreme confidence.
Second, preserving experiential immersion and apprenticeship through exemplification. Practical wisdom is not acquired solely through abstract instruction. It also develops through experience, observation, participation, and exposure to the judgment of more experienced practitioners. Maintaining these conditions may become increasingly difficult as AI transforms professional activities, organizational structures, and opportunities for learning.
Third, remaining grounded in frontline reality. This requires protecting the autonomy and agency of people who possess situated, experience-based know-how. It also means resisting the persistent managerial temptation to substitute rigid metrics and centralized control for contextual understanding, a temptation that AI may considerably amplify by making old bureaucratic fantasies of hypercontrol at a distance appear technically feasible.
These are not marginal concerns. They go to the heart of how organizations develop, sustain, or undermine their capacity for sound judgment.
Beyond the Rhetoric of Human Judgment
Despite the now-ubiquitous rhetoric about the importance of human judgment, I see relatively little coordinated effort to cultivate these capacities.
Instead, I increasingly encounter confident declarations that consultants, frontline managers, lawyers, physicians, and other professionals should already have been replaced by AI.
The speed with which some commentators move from impressive technical demonstrations to sweeping conclusions about human dispensability is rather disheartening.
None of this implies rejecting AI.
On the contrary, I use these remarkable tools every day, and I readily acknowledge that we will have to learn to coexist with them. When appropriately guided, AI can even contribute to the development and exercise of practical wisdom, for instance by helping us consider a situation from multiple perspectives, challenge our initial interpretations, or explore alternative courses of action.
But supporting judgment and replacing it are two very different ambitions.
Judgment as a Human Practice
Reducing wisdom-based judgment entirely to AI would, I believe, be a serious mistake.
Practical wisdom deserves to be cultivated for its own sake, not merely preserved as a residual human competence until machines become sufficiently capable.
It is rooted in a particular form of life, one in which questions of truth, good and evil, responsibility, and what it means to live well are not simply problems to be processed. They are existential concerns in which we are personally implicated.
AI systems may help us reason about such questions. But they do not spontaneously encounter them as matters of their own existence.
That distinction is worth preserving, even as the technological boundaries of what AI can accomplish continue to move.
Of course, once machines have replaced all of us and Elon Musk's vision of universal income has relieved us first of our cognitive duties, then of our ethical responsibilities, perhaps we will stop caring about these questions altogether.
After all, we will have more important things to do on TikTok.
Judging (!) by my LinkedIn feed, quite a few people already seem well on their way to this glorious future.
✍️ Sébastien Dias
References:
i/ The review cited in the post:
Tsoukas, H., Hadjimichael, D., Nair, A. K., Pyrko, I., & Woolley, S. (2024). Judgment in business and management research: Shedding new light on a familiar concept. Academy of Management Annals, 18(2), 626–669.
ii/ A few other wise (!) readings on judgment and practical wisdom, as a starting point:
Alvesson, M., & Nørmark, D. (2026). Return to judgement: The case for post-infantilized management. Bristol University Press.
Kristjánsson, K., Fowers, B., Darnell, C., & Pollard, D. (2021). Phronesis (practical wisdom) as a type of contextual integrative thinking. Review of General Psychology, 25(3), 239–257.
Nonaka, I., Chia, R., Holt, R., & Peltokorpi, V. (2014). Wisdom, management and organization. Management Learning, 45(4), 365-376.
Shotter, J., & Tsoukas, H. (2014). Performing phronesis: On the way to engaged judgment. Management Learning, 45(4), 377–396.
Former physician, McKinsey Associate Partner and senior healthcare executive.
I advise CEOs, boards and investors on high-stakes decisions, leadership, transformation and complex execution, combining rigorous analysis, independent judgment and pragmatic support.
