The roundtable was hosted by Roland Deiser, chair of the Center for the Future of Organization [CFFO] at the Drucker School of Management as part of a series of sessions done with Developing Leaders Quarterly, a booklet series published in collaboration with Ideas for Leaders. Almost 400 people signed up for the roundtable thereby registering 47 countries in the audience making it a really global affair.

In this roundtable, host Roland Deiser brought together thought and practice leaders from academia, business and consulting for an unstructured dialogue about a burning topic, and they are represented by Tom Davenport from academia, business it’s Eve Psalti from business, and Dr. Carsten Linz from the consulting world.

/ THEMES

• Why AI’s evolution is shifting from traditional use cases to broader applications
• Why AI’s impact on the workforce requires balancing agility and governance
• Why Digital Transformation needs to focus on use cases, not just technology
• Why AI’s organizational impact extends beyond the workforce to ecosystems and strategy
• Why trust, skills, and alignment are crucial for AI adoption success.

/ ABOUT THE SPEAKERS

• Dr. Carsten Linz is the CEO and Founder of bluegain. Formerly Group Digital Officer at BASF and Business Development Officer at SAP, he is known for building €100 million businesses and leading large-scale transformations affecting 60,000+ employees. He is represented on various boards including Shareability’s Technology & Innovation Committee and Social Impact. A member of the World Economic Forum’s Expert Network, Dr. Linz is also author of renowned books and articles who shares his expertise in executive programs at top business schools around the world.
• Eve Psalti is a tech and business leader, currently the Senior Director at Microsoft’s Azure AI engineering organization responsible for scaling & commercializing artificial intelligence solutions. She was previously the Head of Strategic Platforms at Google Cloud where she worked with F500 companies helping them grow their businesses through digital transformation initiatives. Prior to Google, Eve held business development, sales, and marketing leadership positions at Microsoft and startups across the US and Europe leading 200-people teams and $600M businesses.
• Thomas Davenport is a world-renowned thought-leader who has helped hundreds of companies revitalize their management practices. He combines his interests in research, teaching, and business management as the President’s Distinguished Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College. He has also taught at the Harvard Business School, the University of Chicago, Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, and the University of Texas at Austin and has directed research centers at Accenture, McKinsey & Company, Ernst & Young, and CSC. Tom earned a Ph.D. from Harvard University in social science.
• Roland Deiser was the founding dean of Daimler-Chrysler’s Corporate University and is founding chairman of the European Corporate Learning Forum (ECLF), a consortium of more than 70 multinational corporations from 14 countries who have teamed up to share practices and shape the future of the corporate learning practice (www.eclf.org). As a scholar, he is an associate professor of organizational politics. Currently, he serves as a senior fellow with the Peter F. Drucker & Masatoshi Ito Graduate School of Management at Claremont Graduate University. He has published more than 40 articles in scientific and professional journals and books and has been teaching at numerous universities on both sides of the Atlantic.