The mistake smart leaders make without realizing it: handing their judgment to AI
David Buirs is a Leadership & Executive Coach based in Amsterdam. This article covers skills in the AI age: why judgment is becoming the leadership skill that matters most as AI takes over more analytical and administrative tasks. The reader learns why AI labs are hiring philosophers, the mistake many leaders make without noticing, and three habits for keeping judgment sharp.
A philosophy graduate currently finds work more easily than a computer science graduate.
Almost nobody saw that coming. A few years ago every student got the same advice: learn to code if you want a future. Today the big AI labs are lining up for philosophers instead. The Economist reported on this recently. In 2024, 7 percent of computer science graduates were unemployed. Among philosophy graduates, that number was lower.
That flips the career logic of the last decade on its head. And it says something about which skills in the AI age actually hold their value. That's what this article is about: the mistake many smart, ambitious leaders make, often without noticing.
Why AI Labs Are Hiring Philosophers
The labs hire philosophers to teach their models how to weigh what's right. They feed them Kant and the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Anthropic, the company behind Claude, builds those sources directly into the model's foundational rules.
That turns out to be the hardest thing to build into a machine. AI can already write code, and it gets better every year. Judging right from wrong, fair from unfair, what a situation actually calls for, is a different matter. So the biggest tech companies in the world bring in people who have spent their lives thinking about exactly those questions.
Let that sink in. The builders of AI find human judgment so scarce and so valuable that they pay top salaries for it.
The Mistake: Outsourcing Your Own Judgment
Here's the mistake many smart leaders make. I count myself among them.
I sometimes catch myself asking AI how to interpret a situation. Or what the right course of action is. The answer comes back, well written and confident. And I think: so that's the right answer. Solved, on to the next thing.
Later, when I think it over, that answer sometimes turns out to be off, given all the facts and circumstances. It just sounded right.
The mistake sits right there. The answer that comes back sounds convincing, but it's the statistically most likely answer to similar questions, drawn from a massive dataset. That doesn't mean it's right for you.
Critics of this trend have a name for it: ethical illiteracy. When machines answer the difficult questions for us, we slowly stop trusting our own judgment. Like a muscle you stop using.
And the risk is highest for the leaders who use AI the most. Whoever adopts fastest, whoever turns to AI for every question, hits this trap first. The more you lean on AI for interpretation, the faster that muscle weakens.
For Leaders, Judgment Is the Job
For most professions, this is an interesting observation. For leaders, it's existential.
Judgment is the core of the role. Whether someone deserves another chance. Whether your feedback was fair. Whether to protect or confront that one team member. Whether this is the right moment for a reorganization.
No dashboard exists for these calls. There's always context only you have: that person's history, the mood in the room, your own gut, trained by years of experience.
A language model knows that context only to the extent you type it in, which is by definition a filtered, simplified version of reality. The answer that comes back sounds certain, while it's built on a fraction of what you actually know.
How to Keep Your Judgment Sharp
I use AI daily myself, for all kinds of things. It comes down to sequence and role. Three habits I follow, and recommend to leaders:
1. Decide first. Form your own judgment before consulting AI. Write two sentences: this is what I think, and here's why. Only then let AI challenge you. That keeps the muscle working.
2. Treat AI as an outside advisor. A good advisor offers perspectives, asks questions, points out blind spots. The decision itself belongs to the leader. That's true for your strategy consultant, and it's true for AI.
3. Train it deliberately. Judgment grows by seeking out difficult situations, reflecting on them, and talking them through. With a sparring partner who asks questions rather than hands you answers.
My gut is often closer to the mark than AI's. Yours probably is too. AI makes an excellent advisor. The judgment call stays ours. That's what we can still do better than any machine.
When did you last make a hard decision without checking with AI first?
In coaching for managers, this is exactly the muscle we work on: recognizing and trusting your own judgment, even under pressure. For leaders at director level, executive coaching amsterdam is a natural next step, since the decisions carry more weight and the context grows more complex.
For organizations that want to build this across the whole management team, an in-company management training is a logical next step.
Curious how this shows up for you or your team? Plan your free introduction here.