Industry Keynote Speaker
Francesco Costigliola
Title: Who Decides Now? AI, Human Judgement and the Changing Shape of
Organisational Decisions
Abstract
AI is changing how organisations decide faster than their structures can adapt. In this keynote, Francesco Costigliola looks at the trends shaping AI in business and in academia. He starts from a distinction that is often missed: AI is much broader than generative AI, and what it can and cannot do depends on the data underneath it. He then looks at why adoption moves ahead of confidence. He covers the controls organisations put in place to limit AI's role, and how cognitive offloading turns into cognitive surrender, where people stop checking AI's output and leave the judgement to it. The session ends with what this means for change management. Keeping human judgement in AI-supported decisions has to be designed in. It does not happen on its own.
Biography
Francesco Costigliola works where AI research meets executive decision-making. He is the founder of Costigliola Advisory, a Lisbon-based consultancy in data, AI and digital transformation. He is also Senior Teaching Fellow and Head of the AI Initiative at AESE Business School, where he designs and teaches AI leadership programmes for senior executives.
He has around 20 years of experience in AI and data science across banking, energy, insurance, retail and consulting in EMEA and APAC. That includes his time as Chief Analytics Officer at a major Portuguese banking group. He holds a PhD in Computational Statistics from the University of Naples, with a thesis on Nonlinear PLS Path Modelling.
His work covers enterprise AI strategy, AI adoption and organisational change, responsible AI and governance. He is writing a book on cognitive surrender: how organisations hand their judgement over to AI.
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Academic Keynote Speaker
Monideepa Tarafdar
Biography
Monideepa Tarafdar is the Charles J. Dockendorff Endowed Professor of Information Systems at the Isenberg School of Management, University of Massachusetts Amherst. She also serves as Editor-in-Chief of the Journal of the Association for Information Systems and PhD Coordinator in Information Systems.
Her research examines human-AI collaboration, AI in hiring and recruitment, AI bias, transparency and fairness, platform work and algorithmic management, technology use and well-being, and the societal and individual impacts of social media.
She was named a Fellow of the Association for Information Systems in 2024 and has been included in the Elsevier-Stanford Top 2% Cited Scientists list. Her academic career has also included professorships at Lancaster University and the University of Toledo, as well as visiting scholar appointments at the London School of Economics and Political Science and the MIT Sloan School Center for Information Systems Research.