BPCC – Brainstorming Session – 21/01/2026

From there, the discussion naturally expanded to the broader question of how AI is changing professions and roles more fundamentally. The medical field became a particularly vivid example. It was provocatively suggested that doctors may one day cease to be a “human” profession, as machines, robots and AI systems increasingly outperform humans in diagnostics, surgery and treatment precision. Yet this view was not left unchallenged. While participants readily acknowledged that AI already supports diagnosis, identifies treatment options across vast data sets, and enables robotic surgeries of remarkable precision, many insisted that something essential remains human: care, reassurance, responsibility, and the ability to navigate uncertainty alongside another human being. Even where machines outperform technically, the meaning of being human in medicine – and by extension in leadership – remains intact.

This led directly to the question of what kind of leaders organisations will need in the future. There was broad agreement that future C-level executives must be at least tech-savvy. Not necessarily engineers or programmers, but sufficiently fluent to understand what AI does, where its limits lie, and how it reshapes governance, decision-making, accountability and power structures within organisations. Several voices were quite clear: leaders who are not digitally fluent will not fail because they are bad leaders, but because they will increasingly be unable to see what is happening around them.

At the same time, a sobering observation emerged: despite the intensity of public discourse around AI, even many tech companies and AI-focused organisations are still far from using AI systematically in their own governance, management processes and internal operations. AI is often showcased outwardly, yet only partially embedded where it really matters – in structure, power, decision rights and accountability. There is, as of today, more self-promotion about AI than true organisational integration.

In this sense, the lunch did not conclude with certainty about what the near future will bring. Quite the opposite. What emerged was a shared understanding that uncertainty itself has become a defining feature of leadership in the age of AI. The challenge is no longer to eliminate ambiguity, but to navigate it responsibly, with judgement, humility and openness to learning.

In the end, the discussion did not reduce leadership to technology, nor did it romanticise the human factor. Instead, it clarified the evolving relationship between the two: technology will profoundly reshape how we lead, how we select leaders and how organisations function. But humanity will continue to determine why we lead, for whom we lead, and what kind of societies we ultimately want to build.

Perhaps this is the most valuable outcome of our exchange in Alfama: a shared conviction that the future of leadership will not be decided by artificial intelligence alone, nor by human intuition in isolation, but by the quality of the dialogue between the two.