As AI’s influence over the workplace broadens, debate continues to ripple across the business landscape—from the breakroom to the boardroom—about how to keep humans meaningfully involved. Many workers and executives alike have championed the idea of keeping a “human in the loop.”
But according to leaders across the C-suite, that safeguard alone won’t be enough. What will matter most in the coming years is judgment, speakers emphasized at Fortune’s Most Powerful Women 2025 summit in Washington, D.C.
“I don’t think that we are thoughtfully enough educating people about how to be good at judgment,” Aashna Kircher, group general manager in the office of the CHRO at Workday, said.
“That’s a step that we will have to take as a civilization, honestly, in the next three to five years: how do we retain decision making and judgment in certain situations? Because you can hold somebody accountable, but if all they’re doing is pressing a button and saying yes, then they’re not actually applying judgment.”
It’s a sentiment echoed by other executives, including Katy George, corporate vice president for workplace transformation at Microsoft. As AI becomes more deeply embedded in day-to-day workflows, George said, the employees who will thrive—especially early in their careers—are those who can demonstrate sound judgment.
“We’re talking about raising the skill level much sooner for early career, whether it’s judgment, whether it’s being able to manage work, because you’re delegating to agents much earlier,” she said.
That also means developing complementary skills: the ability to delegate, maintain quality control, and approach problems with end-to-end, design-thinking mindsets.
Skills of the future
For Bijal Shah, CEO of Guild, the rise of AI is also reshaping what it means to be educated—and what skills will actually help workers adapt.
“I get asked all the time: should my child get a college degree, or just enter into the workforce?” she said. “Honestly, I don’t think it matters. What I think matters at the end of the day is that people have a really good foundation in math and a really good foundation in reading comprehension—and the best way to do that is to further your education.”
Shah added that while the debate over the value of higher education continues, the focus should be on depth, not just credentials. “I’m a little bit worried that are losing sight of the fact in this battle that to thrive in this next era, they actually need confidence in their ability to go deep on a subject,” she said. “It doesn’t really matter what subject it is.”
And for managers, the challenge—and opportunity—will look different. Every manager of the future, George said, will effectively need to become a chief experimentation officer.
“The technology is going to keep improving, and the way that it’s embedded into work processes will keep changing and improving,” George said. “And so every manager needs to be driving a continuous, system-wide change in the way that the team works in a way that really is inclusive and builds their team in but also continues to evolve and makes their team more productive [and] more effective.”