69. Puranam Panish - Why organisations will need human centric AI to survive

About this episode

The episode discusses the necessity of human centric AI for organizational survival, featuring insights from Professor Phanish Puranam on the impact of AI on work and collaboration.

In this episode, i am joined by Professor Phanish Puranam from INSEAD, one of the world’s leading thinkers on strategy and organizational design, and this year’s recipient of the prestigious Oscar Morgenstern Medal from the University of Vienna. Our conversation explores the deep and often hidden ways in which technology and Artificial Intelligence in particular, reshapes organizations—how we work, how we collaborate, and how power is distributed inside organizations. In the first part of the interview, we dive into one of the most fundamental questions in organizational science: centralization versus decentralization. How do technologies, especially communication technologies, shift the balance between empowering workers with autonomy or giving managers unprecedented tools for monitoring and control. In the second half of our discussion, we turn to generative AI and its impact on how employees skills and expertise are developed within organizations. While GenAI promises efficiency and new forms of collaboration, it also carries the risk of “cognitive offloading”—outsourcing thinking to machines in ways that could erode human competence over time. We consider the tension between…

People in this episode

Host: Manuel Pasieka

Guest: Phanish Puranam

Topics covered

• human centric AI
• organizational design
• centralization vs decentralization
• generative AI
• employee skills development
• cognitive offloading

Keywords

• AI
• organizational science
• technology
• centralization
• decentralization
• generative AI
• cognitive offloading
• employee autonomy
• expertise development

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: INSEAD, University of Vienna

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