Published on: September 25, 2025 at 3:33 pm
By Nick Keppler
In recent years, the topic of artificial intelligence and its potential to perform tasks that were once the exclusive purview of the human mind has been omnipresent in the news. AI is sometimes spoken about less like a technological development and more like a wave of transformation that could leave anyone not adequately versed in it obsolete, jobless, and replaceable by—what else?—AI, or people who are adept in using it.
Management and business professionals might feel a nebulous urge to either embrace or push back against AI without understanding its potential role in their sector.
The best thing to do is allow yourself a sandbox in which to familiarize yourself with AI tools, said Academy of Management Scholar Marc Gruber of the École Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne. You do not need an exact goal.
“Get your hands dirty early on so that you understand what holds fast,” Gruber said.
He recommends looking at different AI tools geared towards your industry or profession, trying a wide variety and noting the differences between them.
“Even if you don’t want to use these tools actively, that’s great passive knowledge because you will start looking at organizational issues and opportunities in a very different way,” Gruber said.
It will also help you to understand what the competition might be doing with AI, he added.
The worst course of action is inaction, said Gruber. No company or industry is too old – fashioned or uniquely dependent on human creativity to be untouched by AI.
“All companies will have some support from artificial intelligence and likely some tasks completed by AI at some point and if you think, ‘Well, my company or my industry will not be affected by that,’ I think you need to think twice,” he said.
