How Leaders Will Succeed in an AI World
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About This Webinar
Five years ago, the advice was often blunt: learn to code. The future seemed to belong to those who could speak the language of machines.
But the machines have become remarkably good at that language themselves.
As artificial intelligence becomes more powerful, the most important human skills are not disappearing.
They are changing in value. Technical expertise remains essential, but the hardest questions facing organisations are increasingly questions of judgement:
- What to automate?
- What to question?
- What to explain?
- What to escalate?
- What should remain accountable to human decision-making?
In this webinar, Professor Ronan McDonald makes the case for the return of wisdom - not as a vague or nostalgic ideal, but as a vital leadership capability. Wisdom means the ability to weigh competing values, read context, act responsibly under uncertainty, and know what matters when systems, data and human experience do not neatly align.
This is not a technical briefing or a checklist-driven training session. It is a reflective and practical conversation for leaders who need to think more clearly about judgement, attention and responsibility in an AI-enabled world.
For leaders and senior managers, this is not an abstract concern. Organisations are already navigating the promises and risks of AI: faster services, better integration, improved decision support, but also new questions about trust, fairness, accountability, attention and public value.
This webinar will explore why judgement is becoming one of the defining leadership capabilities of the AI age, and how leaders can cultivate the habits of attention, interpretation and reflection that good judgement requires.
What We'll Explore
- Can AI think critically? Can it be creative?
- What is wisdom, and why might we need it now?
- Are we paying attention?
- What does this mean for how you lead?
You'll Leave With
- A deeper understanding of why judgement is becoming a defining leadership capability in the AI age
- A clearer language for distinguishing intelligence, knowledge, judgement and wisdom
- A framework for thinking about what should be automated, what should be questioned, and what should remain accountable to human decision-making
- An honest reckoning with attention and why sustained focus, interpretation and reflection matter for leadership
- A renewed sense of the value of humanities skills: critical thinking, interpretation, ethical imagination, historical awareness and care with language
- Better questions for thinking about AI strategy, organisational capability and human responsibility
Who Should Attend
This webinar is designed for leaders and senior managers responsible for strategy, culture, capability, service delivery, transformation or technology adoption.
It will be especially relevant to those working in local government, public service, community-facing organisations, technology-enabled businesses, and organisations navigating the opportunities and risks of AI.
No prior technical knowledge of AI is required. The webinar is intended for people who want to think more deeply about leadership, judgement and human capability in a rapidly changing technological environment.
This is one session you won’t want to miss.
Date: Thursday August 6, 2026
Time: 4:00 PM – 5:00 PM AEST
Duration: 45 minutes discussion, 15 minutes Q&A
Presenters: Ronan McDonald, Professor, School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne & Fergal Coleman, Co-founder & CRO, Symphony3
Register Now to Secure Your Spot!
Professor Ronan McDonald is a professor in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne, where he holds the Gerry Higgins Chair in Irish Studies. He completed his doctorate at the University of Oxford and is a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities.
Professor McDonald’s work focuses on literature, criticism, attention and the value of the humanities. He is the author of The Death of the Critic and editor of The Values of Literary Studies and has published widely on the public role of humanistic thinking.
His current work explores attention as one of the central intellectual and civic challenges of the present. He is developing a book, Critical Attention: How the Humanities Can Help Us Focus, which argues that the humanities offer more than cultural knowledge: they cultivate habits of noticing, interpretation, judgement and care that are increasingly urgent in a world of distraction, automation and artificial intelligence.
In this webinar, Professor McDonald brings that research to bear on the challenges facing leaders today: how to make good decisions under uncertainty, how to preserve human judgement in increasingly automated systems, and how to cultivate the attentional and ethical capacities that organisations will need in the AI age.
Professor McDonald is a regular contributor to public intellectual life, writing for outlets including Australian Book Review, Sydney Review of Books and The Conversation. He is known as an engaging and accessible speaker who brings scholarly rigour, clarity and wit to some of the most pressing questions of our time.