What would your organization look like if you built it today—no legacy systems, no inherited org chart, no “this is how we’ve always done it”—and designed it from the ground up with AI at its core?
This deceptively simple question opened the 2026 Annual Symposium of the SEV Center of Excellence in Creative Leadership (CECL), hosted by Alba Graduate Business School on 19 March at the Lighthouse of the Stavros Niarchos Foundation Cultural Center. It set the tone for a discussion that quickly moved beyond easy answers.
Titled “Becoming AI-First: Reinventing Work and Organizations,” the symposium brought together a deliberately small group of C-suite executives, HR directors, and strategy leaders—individuals whose organizations are already confronting these challenges in real time—alongside leading academics from Boston University and Harvard Business School. The ambition was not to speculate, but to engage directly with what it takes to redesign organizations in the age of AI.
Opening the symposium, Professor Nikos Mylonopoulos, Academic Director of the SEV CECL and Professor of Digital Business at Alba, offered a framing that resonated throughout the day.
“Becoming AI-First,” he argued, is not just a declaration—it is a provocation.
On one level, it reflects an emerging reality: just as mobile technologies became the default medium for work and life over the past decade, AI is set to become the new operating layer of organizations—faster and at greater scale. On another level, it poses a challenge: how do leaders redesign work and organizations to truly capture this shift, rather than simply automating what already exists?
The symposium unfolded across three interconnected themes: reinventing business models, preparing the workforce, and addressing an information environment that AI is making increasingly difficult to trust.
Marshall Van Alstyne, Allen & Kelli Questrom Professor of Information Systems at Boston University, opened with a problem that felt immediately urgent: the erosion of trust.
Misinformation is not new. What is new is the absence of consequences. As Van Alstyne noted, those who generate and spread false information today often have no “skin in the game”—and AI has dramatically accelerated both the scale and speed of that dynamic.
His response is a market-based solution: systems that make truth economically cheap and misinformation expensive, without relying on centralized authorities to determine what is true.
The approach, already tested experimentally at scale, positions incentives—not regulation—as the mechanism for restoring trust. The SEV CECL has been among the first organizations globally to engage with and apply this research.
Shane Greenstein, Martin Marshall Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School, turned to the question shaping boardroom conversations worldwide: Is AI investment a bubble?
Rather than offering predictions, Greenstein pointed to historical patterns—railroads, electrification, fiber optics, the internet. In each case, massive capital was deployed, infrastructure was built, and many investors lost money. What determined success was not the technology itself, but what he termed co-invention: the organizational redesign required to translate a general-purpose technology into real economic value.
With the world’s largest technology companies expected to invest between $600 and $690 billion in AI infrastructure this year, the infrastructure is being built. The open question is who will successfully reinvent how work gets done.
The first panel, “Work Reimagined: Humans, Agents, and the New Division of Labor,” brought together leaders at the forefront of workforce transformation, including Drossia Kardassi, Head of HR at INTERAMERICAN; Stavroula Papadopoulou, Learning and Development Director at HELLENiQ ENERGY; Erato Paraschaki, Senior HR Executive and Coach at ACC/EMCC; Costis Paikos, Group Chief Digital Officer at Eurobank; and Myrto Thanou, HR Manager at Space Hellas.
The conversation quickly moved beyond familiar narratives. While some organizations, such as McKinsey, now describe their workforce as two-thirds human and one-third AI agents, participants agreed that defining the right mix is only the starting point.
The harder questions are just emerging: How do organizations develop talent when the entry-level work through which expertise was traditionally built is being automated? How do you evaluate performance when AI is contributing to the output? And what does it mean to manage systems that can reason, communicate, and exercise judgment—but are not human?
What became clear is that the future of work is not simply about substitution, but about fundamentally redefining how capability, learning, and leadership are built.
The second panel, “Building AI-First Organizations: Strategy, Operations, and Competitive Advantage,” featured Nikos Moraitakis, Co-founder and CEO of Workable; Thymios Papadopoulos, Group Head of Strategy at Olympia Group; Nikolaos Mouratis, Director of Data and AI at Kotsovolos – PPC Group; and Yannis Katsanos, Global AI Strategist and former Tech Lead at a US Fortune 500 company.
Here, the discussion centered on a tension every leader in the room recognized. AI transformation requires long-term investment and organizational change, while business expectations remain anchored in short-term performance cycles. Even when efficiencies are achieved, they often generate new layers of complexity, demand, and cost—absorbing the gains they create.
The panel traced the different stages of organizational maturity—from experimentation to scaling and, ultimately, to full business model reinvention. Moving between these stages, however, is rarely smooth. It often requires dismantling structures and practices that are still delivering value, making transformation as much about unlearning as it is about innovation.
The symposium made one thing unmistakably clear: becoming AI-first is not a technology initiative—it is a leadership challenge.
As AI reshapes industries, the organizations that will lead are those willing to rethink fundamentals: how they create value, develop talent, and design work itself.
At Alba Graduate Business School and the SEV Center of Excellence in Creative Leadership, the focus is not on whether this transformation will happen—but on how thoughtfully, and how boldly, leaders will respond.
