#543 Who Leads When AI Thinks? The Leadership Question Behind Artificial Intelligence | Interview with Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Who Leads When AI Thinks?
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg interviewed by Niels Brabandt
Who Leads When AI Thinks? The Leadership Question Behind Artificial Intelligence
Artificial intelligence has entered the boardroom, the strategy session, the operational workflow, and the decision-making process. Yet the decisive question is not whether AI can think faster than people. The real question is who leads when AI becomes part of the thinking process.
In this interview, leadership expert Niels Brabandt speaks with Dr. Adrian Wolfberg about his book, Who Leads When AI Thinks? How Leaders Frame Decisions and Exercise Judgment. Their discussion moves beyond the familiar debate about whether machines will replace humans. Instead, it focuses on judgement, problem framing, leadership responsibility, and the conditions under which human and machine contributions should be combined.
For decision-makers in business, the interview offers a necessary correction to a growing management mistake: treating AI as either an all-purpose solution or an existential threat. Dr. Adrian Wolfberg argues that the leadership challenge starts before any technology is used. Leaders must understand the problem, its structure, its novelty, its human tensions, and the consequences of misjudgement. Only then can they decide where AI belongs and where human judgement remains irreplaceable.
The Motivation: Changing the Conversation About AI and Leadership
Niels Brabandt opens the interview by asking Dr. Adrian Wolfberg why he published the book at this moment. Dr. Wolfberg explains that his work on decision-making reaches back more than a decade, including his time teaching at the U.S. Army War College. His interest deepened when research around AI and intelligence analysis revealed a critical gap: many discussions focused on the technology itself, while too few addressed how AI would actually operate inside decision workflows.
Dr. Wolfberg states that by 2024 he wanted to change the conversation. Rather than starting with the technology, he wanted leaders to think first about the problem, the decision context, and the relationship between human and machine contribution. He describes the book not as an engineering or technology book, but as a leadership book. Its central concern is how leaders frame decisions and exercise judgement in an environment where AI can be powerful, fast, and deeply consequential.
This distinction matters. In many organisations, AI adoption is framed as a tooling issue: which platform to buy, which functions to automate, which productivity gains to promise. The interview between Dr. Adrian Wolfberg and Niels Brabandt makes clear that this is an insufficient starting point. The first responsibility of leadership is not tool selection. It is problem comprehension.
Where AI Helps and Where Human Judgement Must Prevail
Niels Brabandt asks one of the defining questions of the current leadership debate: in which situations will AI prevail, in which situations will humans prevail, and where will both have to work together? Dr. Adrian Wolfberg answers by drawing a distinction between structured problems and wicked problems.
According to Dr. Wolfberg, AI is highly suitable for structured problems: situations in which the inputs are well understood, the specifications are clear, the expected outcomes are not controversial, and the purpose of solving the problem is broadly agreed. Manufacturing processes, technical specifications, and highly defined workflows are examples of contexts where AI can contribute strongly.
By contrast, AI is far less suited to problems where people struggle to define the problem itself, where stakeholders bring different agendas, where purposes conflict, and where the outcome cannot be specified with confidence in advance. Dr. Wolfberg refers to these as wicked problems. They are not merely complex because they contain many interdependencies. They are wicked because people disagree about what the real issue is, what success would mean, and whose interests should shape the solution.
Niels Brabandt adds an important point during the exchange: stakeholders may not only have different perspectives, but different intentions. This is a crucial distinction for business leaders. AI can process information, identify patterns, and accelerate analysis. It cannot resolve political interest, moral conflict, organisational power, cultural meaning, or strategic intent without human judgement.
The Decision Cube: A Practical Framework for Leaders
For leaders who may not have an academic background, Niels Brabandt asks what kind of book they can expect. Dr. Adrian Wolfberg makes clear that the book is written for practitioners. He deliberately uses everyday language and avoids making the text a prescriptive checklist.
One of the central frameworks he presents is the decision cube. It helps leaders assess three aspects of a decision: how complicated the issue is, whether the situation is new or familiar, and whether contentious human agendas are involved. These dimensions help leaders identify the nature of the problem before they decide how AI should be used.
The value of this approach is that it prevents one-size-fits-all AI deployment. A leader who understands the decision cube is less likely to default to AI for every task and less likely to reject AI out of fear. Instead, the leader can ask a more disciplined question: which part of this problem benefits from machine contribution, and which part requires human judgement?
For business decision-makers, this is the shift from AI enthusiasm to AI governance. The decision cube does not reduce leadership to a formula. It gives leaders a structured way to think before they act.
Why Speed Can Become a Leadership Risk
Towards the end of the interview, Dr. Adrian Wolfberg raises a point that may become one of the defining leadership concerns of the AI era: time. AI operates at a speed far beyond human capacity. That speed can be valuable, but it can also compress reflection, shorten deliberation, and push organisations into decisions before they have understood the issue.
Dr. Wolfberg argues that leaders must allocate enough time for thinking. If they do not, they risk defaulting too much to AI simply because it is faster. The danger is not only operational. It is philosophical and organisational. If leaders surrender the time required for judgement, they begin to alter the role of humans in decision-making itself.
Niels Brabandt agrees with this concern, and the interview closes with a strong leadership implication: AI does not remove the need for human judgement. It increases the responsibility to know where judgement must occur.
The Business Implication: AI Is Not the Leader
The interview between Niels Brabandt and Dr. Adrian Wolfberg is particularly relevant for executives, founders, board members, senior managers, and transformation leaders. It challenges the shallow idea that AI leadership is mainly about automation, productivity, or technical implementation. Those issues matter, but they are downstream from a more demanding question: who remains accountable for the decision?
Dr. Wolfberg’s central message is that AI can contribute powerfully when the problem is structured, understood, and suitable for machine assistance. It can also support leaders in human-centred situations by providing information, context, or analytical support. Yet in wicked problems, where meaning, purpose, conflict, and judgement dominate, leadership cannot be outsourced.
Niels Brabandt’s framing of the conversation reinforces this point for business audiences. The leadership task is not to compete with AI. The leadership task is to govern the relationship between human and machine contribution. That requires judgement, humility, structure, and the willingness to slow down when speed becomes dangerous.
Why This Interview Matters Now
Many organisations are already using AI without a sufficiently mature leadership model. Some treat AI as a universal answer. Others remain paralysed by fear. Both positions are weak. The stronger position is disciplined integration: knowing when AI is useful, when it is inappropriate, and when human judgement must set the direction.
In the interview, Dr. Adrian Wolfberg provides the intellectual architecture for this approach. Niels Brabandt brings the conversation into the practical reality of leadership. Together, they show that AI does not make leadership obsolete. It makes leadership more visible.
The question “Who leads when AI thinks?” is therefore not rhetorical. It is the strategic question every organisation must answer before AI becomes embedded into the most consequential parts of work.
About the Interview
This article is based on the leadership podcast and videocast interview “Who Leads When AI Thinks - Dr. Adrian Wolfberg interviewed by Niels Brabandt”. In the interview, Niels Brabandt speaks with Dr. Adrian Wolfberg about AI, leadership, judgement, decision-making, wicked problems, structured problems, and the future role of human agency in organisations.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg is presented in the interview as the author of Who Leads When AI Thinks? How Leaders Frame Decisions and Exercise Judgment. Niels Brabandt is the interviewer and leadership expert guiding the conversation for a business audience.
Niels Brabandt
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More on this topic in this week's videocast and podcast with Niels Brabandt: Videocast / Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the videocast’s and podcast’s transcript, read below this article.
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Podcast and Videocast Transcript
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
AI is here, and AI is making decisions. Or is it? Actually, the question is: who is making the decisions? And of course, when we talk about leadership, who is leading at the moment—is it AI, or is it the humans? We have an expert on the matter with us here today. Hello and welcome, Dr. Adrian Wolfberg. Hello, Adrian.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Good morning—or good afternoon, Nils. Thank you for inviting me.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Thank you very much for taking the time. And we'll get straight into the content: you wrote the book, and of course I think it's a really good title, especially in today's times. Many people wonder what's really happening at the moment, so who leads when AI thinks? And of course, my first question has to be: what was your main motivation to publish the book at this point in time?
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Well, it kind of goes back to, you know, 10 years ago. I was teaching at the U.S. Army War College, and I was doing a study on decision-making. So I've been focused on decision-making for the last 15—yeah, 15 years. And at the time, this was 10 years ago, the Army was just kind of thinking about AI in just kind of an intellectual way, and that got me kind of thinking.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
And then in 2022, I worked with some undergraduates at Rutgers University. And one of the students was interested in how AI could be a positive or a negative contribution to intelligence analysts, you know, who work for U.S. intelligence agencies. And they weren't able to complete their study because of other time constraints, and that—so that—I said, well, if they didn't have time to do something, I'm going to go ahead and do a study.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
And so I did a study of how, basically the end of '22, how people associated with the national security business—academics, consultants, people in government—thought about AI. And what I realized is that even at that nascent time, there was no thought about how it would actually work as part of a workflow. You know, who decides what, you know, how is the problem framed, and so forth.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
So that led me to not focus on—so I wanted to—so by 2024, I wanted to change the conversation and not talk about the technology itself. I wanted to talk about how and what people need to think about before they even touch the technology, so that they have a better chance of having successful outcomes using the technology. And so that was my motivation.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
And it's really a leadership book. It's not an AI book. There's no engineering, there's no technology. It's a leadership book about how to frame a problem and what happens over the course of a life of a problem, to be thinking about the best match between human contribution and machine contribution. So it provides a lot of frameworks to that, to help a leader or people who maybe are managing people who are working in or with AI.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. So when we talk about judgment today, what would you say—where does AI go? Is it because, of course, you know the fear that usually people will approach you with as soon as they talk about AI? They say, well, are the machines basically taking over? Are they the ones who are going to make the decisions in the future? So in which situation do you think that human decisions will prevail, and which situations do you think probably AI is going to prevail, and where do we have a mixture of both?
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Yeah, that's a really good question, Nils.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Where there are very structured problems that are well understood, that the inputs are well understood, that there's not controversy in terms of expected outcomes, or there's no contradictions between the purpose of a—excuse me—solving a problem, that's really conducive to AI. So just think about, you know, manufacturing a product like, you know, a computer, or, you know, where it's—there's specifications that are well understood. Okay, that's—that is really conducive to AI.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
But those things that are not conducive to AI are going to be issues that there are—that people struggle to even understand what is the real problem. And that they would—and on top of that, there are going to be different agendas about how to solve the problem. People will have different perspectives. They might have different purposes.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
The—
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
They might even have different intentions as well. So they might have different intentions depending on what they want the outcome to be.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Yeah. So these are—you know, we call these things wicked problems. These not only have complexity to do with it—so, you know, complexity in this sense just simply is a lot of interdependencies that may not be fully understood or be able to control.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
But when it's wicked, when we don't understand what the nature of the problem is right off the get-go, we don't understand what the outcome is going to look like or how it may be applied. So just as an example, how would you—how would you solve the healthcare crisis? Well, what—you know, what is the crisis?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
I mean, that is probably—so the only defining the crisis probably could take us hours, weeks, months, and years to define. Only where we actually have to start from.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Yeah. So, you know, or how do you solve poverty? Or, you know, how do you solve polarization in public life or political life? These are genuinely human issues.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Now, having said all that, on both sides of these extremes, on the—those kind of issues that are really conducive to AI, there will always be some kind of small human element involved. Similarly, in those things that are predominantly human, there could very well be a small element of AI that could be used to provide information to help better understand what the current status is of X, Y, or Z. But that's kind of the spectrum that I've laid out.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. Excellent. And especially when now people think—I mean, I read your CV and it's really impressive. So when people now say, "Hey, frameworks, of course, will help me." And when people now say, "Look, I'm looking at this interview," and maybe some people say, "I am a leader in the business, however, I am not a particularly well-read academic.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
I don't have a PhD." So what kind of read can people expect when they open the book? Should they be determined academics, or is this a read for absolutely everyone?
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
It's a read for everyone. I've intentionally changed the—used everyday language. I'm a practitioner myself. I'm also a scholar, so I know how to write in both worlds. I use language that is not academic.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
I use—it's not a book that is prescriptive, as in, "Here's a list of five things you have to do. Do this one first. Do this one second." It's more about, "Here's how to think, and here are kind of the space to think about." So the, you know, the example of what is the nature of the problem that you're actually working.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
So I provide a—what I call a decision cube. It's understanding three very kind of simple, straightforward aspects. You know, how complicated is this thing you're looking at? Is this new, or is it familiar to you? And are there contentious agendas that humans have from either political—I mean small p—organizational, and so forth.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
So if you can wrap yourself around those three areas and help you, that kind of framework will help you identify the kind of problem it is. And then from that, you can figure out, "Okay, here's where I think AI could be helpful in this part. Here's where it may not be appropriate here." And so you can start assigning the right mix in various aspects of the problem, as opposed to a one-size-fits-all approach to just kind of defaulting AI to everything.
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Excellent. And of course, one question—the last question I have—I have to ask. When people now think, "Hey, I'm going to buy the book. I'm going to read the book." And then they say, "I think—I think Adrian could be really helpful to our business or to our organization." Maybe they have a question, or they ask to, for example, get you in as a keynote speaker, as a guest speaker, trainer, coach, mentor. How can people get in touch with you?
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
There's a few ways. LinkedIn is always one way. I do have a website, and you can contact me through that. Nils, I don't know if you're going to put that information—
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Of course. Yeah, we're going to add all that, yes.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Yeah. So those are the two ways, and those are the best ways. And that's how we can go forward. It's—I would say that anybody who's interested in this has to think about the value of time. And I think one of the books—I'm actually in the process of thinking about writing a—I'm two books away now thinking of what I'm going to write about—is how to manage time in the sense of being able to not be so rushed that you don't understand what's going on.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Because AI is pushing us to the point where we're not giving ourselves enough time to understand what's going on, because it operates at an incredible speed, much faster than we can. So this is also part of the conversation that I'm trying to change, is that we have to—no matter what sector people are working in, what business, it doesn't matter. If you're going to use AI, you have to start thinking about allocating enough time to thinking.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
Because if we don't, we're going to end up shifting what it means to be human. I don't talk about that in the book, but just in terms of our conversation here, that is an important implication that we want to think about. Because if we give up time to think, then we default, I say, everything to AI. And then the question is, what is the role of humans?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Yeah, absolutely.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
What are we?
Niels Brabandt EMBA MBA MSc
Absolutely. I think these are the perfect final words. So you see, "Who leads when AI thinks? How leaders frame decisions and exercise judgment." I think we now see that this book is an absolute must-read. So at the end of this podcast and videocast, there's only one thing left for me to say: Adrian Wolfberg, thank you very much for your time.
Dr. Adrian Wolfberg
You're welcome, Nils. Very nice to be part of your podcast.