At the House of Beautiful Business in Athens, the focus was less on ready-made answers and more on new perspectives: on business, leadership, artificial intelligence – and on the role humans should play in an increasingly technology-driven economy.

A few thoughts have stayed with me.

The future of business is a question of design

Athens is a special place to think about the future. A city where, more than 2,000 years ago, fundamental ideas about democracy, society, responsibility and how we live together took shape. And perhaps that is precisely why it is such a fitting place to ask: How do we want to do business in the future?

At the House of Beautiful Business, people from business, science, technology, the arts and wider society came together. Not to present the next management model, but to connect perspectives that are still too often considered separately in everyday business.

For me, two themes in particular became closely connected: new economic models and artificial intelligence.

AI is already changing how we work, make decisions and design organisations. The interesting question is therefore no longer whether companies will use AI. What matters is what we choose to use it for – and what we consciously decide not to delegate to it.

The more capable technology becomes, the more important the abilities that cannot simply be automated become: judgement. Empathy. Responsibility. Creativity. The ability to hold contradictions, bring different perspectives together and make decisions even when the data does not provide a clear answer.

This also changes the way I look at organisations.

Perhaps the next major transformation is not about making companies even more efficient. Perhaps we need to ask a more fundamental question: What kind of organisations do we want to build for a world in which technology can take on more and more?

What structures encourage responsibility rather than self-protection? What kind of leadership provides direction without maximising control? How do we organise collaboration when knowledge is available at any time, but trust is not? And how do we define business success when growth alone is no longer a sufficient answer?

Athens did not provide ready-made answers to these questions. Fortunately.

Perhaps that is exactly the value of places and encounters like this. They do not immediately change what we do. First, they change the perspective from which we decide what to do next.

And sometimes, that is exactly where transformation begins.

2026 | sr + AI