16659: The Human Competitive Advantage in the Age of AI: Researching and Cultivating Human Strengths

In a world increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence, what sets humans apart and how do we ensure that AI enriches rather than diminishes the human experience and their contribution to the future of work? To explore these questions we are organizing a dynamic professional development workshop that will explore the unique skills and qualities that humans possess and AI cannot replicate—and why honing them is more urgent than ever. As AI continues transforming industries, it’s not enough to keep pace. Human-AI collaboration is increasingly becoming the cornerstone of decision-making in organizations, task performance, and overall how work gets done in organizations (Shrestha et al. 2019); as a result, we need to not only understand the role of AI but even more importantly the role human qualities and broader capabilities play in making the collaboration with AI successful (Beane 2024; Mollick 2024). In this way, the proposed PDW advances the discourse around human-AI collaboration by emphasizing the irreplaceable role of human qualities, like intuition, emotional intelligence, creativity, empathy, critical thinking, bodily experience, transformational learning, agentic capabilities (e.g. intentionality, forethought, self-reflexivity, self- reactiveness), in making this collaboration truly effective. As such, the workshop reimagines human-AI collaboration by underscoring how cultivating human strengths can lead to a more balanced, enriching integration of AI into our workplaces. With this workshop, we aim to engage in forward- thinking discussions, explore cutting-edge research, and gain actionable insights on how to cultivate those human advantages that thrive together with AI to enhance the performance of individuals and organizations.

The panel is free to attend for all and requires no pre-registration. For the roundtable session plaese submit a 1-pager on https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1Hj1cJZ4- grEPMfFLTRIc8d6RSQdht3MIOt48pSKSlxg/edit