Artificial intelligence (AI) is not just a tech question. It’s also an ESG question. Because while machine learning is fundamentally changing what constitutes competitive advantage for businesses, it is also making the “G” in ESG more important than ever.
For investors, this is more than a passing trend. It’s a seismic shift that will redefine the investment space for decades to come. It requires an entirely new way of looking at information, and at the decisions we make.
A current Instagram trend sparked this thought. Right now, the 1980s are having their biggest pop culture moment since… well… the 1980s. Instagram’s viral ’80s flashback photo trend uses AI image generation tools to transform today’s selfies into nostalgic retro-stylised portraits, featuring hairstyles and fashion we haven’t seen in four decades (for good reason).
The follow-on conversation around the trend was environmentally-focused – how much energy and water did we all use to take us back to the 80s?
But there’s also an irony in using one of today’s most advanced technologies to recreate an era when our relationship with technology looked very different. In the 1980s, computers were still a relative rarity. Today, they’re everywhere – and AI is taking that evolution one step further, changing not only how we work, but what we value in human work.
For decades now, the economy has rewarded people for being more machine-like: productive, mechanical, efficient. The Industrial Revolution multiplied human muscle and prized precision. The Information Age moved work from factories to offices, but still rewarded speed, optimisation and information processing.
Then artificial intelligence arrived. And while much of the debate has focused on what (or who) machines might replace, the deeper transformation is not simply that AI is becoming more intelligent. It is that intelligence itself is becoming abundant.
Every economic era has been shaped by what was scarce: land, machinery, capital or knowledge. The AI age changes that equation. Today, almost anybody can ask AI to explain legislation, analyse financial statements, draft reports, summarise research, condense long articles or generate code. (Or, for that matter, make a 2026 selfie look like it was made in the 1980s.)
I even asked AI to help condense this article. The quality of the output is not always perfect, but it is increasingly useful as a starting point.
When knowledge becomes widely accessible, its value changes. Organisations will increasingly reward people not only for what they know, but for how they think about what they know.
But while AI can produce analysis, compare alternatives, model scenarios and optimise decisions, it cannot decide what is worth optimising. In investment, AI can estimate returns and risks quickly, but someone – someone human – still has to ask: Is this the right investment? Does it align with our purpose? Who benefits? Who bears the cost?
Those are not questions of intelligence. They are questions of judgement. Intelligence answers questions; judgement decides which questions are the most important.
The greatest consequence of creating intelligent machines may not be that machines become more like humans. It may be that humans are finally forced to rediscover what it truly means to be human.
Governance – the often-overlooked “G” in ESG – is central to this. In the decades to come, AI agents will need clear objectives, guardrails, accountability and oversight. Humans still need purpose, trust and leadership.
As AI assumes more routine cognitive work, leadership becomes less about controlling tasks and more about defining purpose, exercising judgement, navigating ambiguity and ensuring that powerful technologies are governed responsibly.
The “soft skills” that we used to treat as secondary to technical expertise will become even more important. Empathy, humility, integrity, moral courage, curiosity and discernment are not soft skills.
They are non-automatable capabilities. The organisations that thrive in the AI age may not simply be those with the best technology, but those with leaders who can be trusted to use it wisely. As AI amplifies the consequences of decisions, character becomes a strategic asset.
The environmental and social consequences of AI will matter, but the governance question may be the most immediate: who sets the rules, who is accountable when AI makes or influences decisions, and how do we ensure that efficiency does not come at the expense of fairness, transparency and long-term trust?
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