Future Intelligence in Practice: Building Human Capability for Lasting Social Impact

Lessons from a global conversation on education, judgment, responsible AI, and the work of turning knowledge into meaningful action.

How can education and professional learning prepare people to exercise judgment when artificial intelligence can generate increasingly sophisticated answers? How can institutions demonstrate that their investments in technology and training are improving people’s capabilities and opportunities?

These questions shaped Future Intelligence for Education and Human Development, held online on September 23, 2026. Convened by the Global ESG Leadership Organization (ESGIN) through its Future Intelligence Hub as a Digital@UNGA 2026 Affiliate Session, the webinar was moderated by Olivier Lazar and brought together perspectives from education, assessment, business, governance, communications, law, and youth development. Event details and recording.

For the PM4TheWorld community, the discussion offered practical lessons about designing initiatives around human needs, organizing learning through experience, assigning responsibility, and evaluating what changes after delivery.

The conversation began with the evidence institutions use to recognize capability.

Mike Chevraux, Co-Founder and CRO of N2X Labs and CEO of Management Worlds, explained that a polished answer no longer provides the same assurance about the understanding behind it. Credentials and assessments retain value, but institutions need to examine more carefully what those measures demonstrate.

He proposed beginning with one assessment that matters. Define the capability it is intended to measure, introduce realistic situations requiring interpretation and decisions, and ask participants to explain their reasoning. Compare the evidence this produces with the existing approach.

This proposal has clear relevance to project-based learning and professional development. Participants need opportunities to demonstrate how they respond to incomplete information, changing conditions, and competing priorities. The assessment should make that process visible.

Daniel Blurton, Managing Director of The Harbour School, examined the environment in which those capabilities develop. His contribution focused on the relationship between a school’s stated intentions and its daily culture.

A curriculum may encourage independent thinking while routines continually communicate that adults hold the answers. A school may value resilience while making students feel they must avoid mistakes. Daniel argued that experience, reflection, and repeated practice are essential to developing the dispositions schools say they want.

For organizations running educational or community projects, this raises an important design question: do participants have meaningful opportunities to exercise responsibility throughout the initiative?

Galina Panina, Dean and Professor at the Open European Academy of Economics and Politics, added the psychological conditions required for learning. Her contribution explored how AI can challenge professional identity, confidence, and people’s sense of their own value.

She proposed a psychological impact audit involving HR and the person responsible for AI implementation. Suggested areas of attention included cognitive load, confidence in questioning AI outputs, and people’s sense of control over final decisions.

Her proposal broadens the criteria by which an implementation can be judged. Training completion and tool usage reveal only part of the experience. Institutions also need to understand whether people feel able to learn, question, and contribute.

The discussion of learning at scale made a similar distinction between delivering an activity and achieving its purpose.

Gori Yahaya, Founder and CEO of UpSkill Universe and a member of the UK Government Digital Skills Council, challenged the emphasis on how many people a program reaches. Drawing on work with entrepreneurs and communities, he emphasized confidence, trusted local institutions, and learning with peers.

His contribution pointed toward follow-up measures that matter to participants: how they apply their learning, whether it helps their businesses, and whether it creates economic opportunities over time. Those questions are especially relevant to programs intended to support communities whose work may sit outside formal organizational structures.

Terry Thornton, Vice President, Client Digital Education and AI Learning Technology Lead at MSCI, described an approach that began with employees’ understanding of their own work. Participants from functions including HR, sales, finance, and marketing spent six weeks learning about AI, two weeks identifying a problem, and six weeks developing a proof of concept for executive review.

As Terry described it, the process connected learning with a specific operational need and a decision about investment. The people closest to the work also retained responsibility for the processes they developed.

His example illustrates how a learning initiative can be organized around application, scrutiny, and continued ownership. It also highlights the role of institutional knowledge: recognizing when information is incomplete, out of date, or missing the context needed for a sound decision.

Enio Jaco, ESGIN Board President and Founder and CEO of Creative Business Solutions, extended the measurement discussion. He called for organizations to examine human capability alongside gains in productivity. His concern was whether increasing reliance on AI could reduce the opportunities people have to exercise their own judgment.

Jennifer Turliuk, President of Koru Labs, brought a systems perspective to these questions. She connected education and technological choices with wider social, economic, and environmental consequences, emphasizing the need for continuous educational improvement and cooperation across institutions.

The discussion also revealed a useful tension. Institutions can learn from approaches used elsewhere, while remaining attentive to differences in learners, cultures, and circumstances. Daniel cautioned against applying an average solution across very different contexts.

That issue became central to the second part of the webinar.

Michael Chi On Wong, Teaching Fellow at The Hong Kong Polytechnic University, described adapting learning models across institutional and cultural boundaries. Entry points, teaching methods, content, and assessment may need to change. Underlying expectations around human oversight and ethical practice should remain clear.

Mahesh Chougule, Assistant Professor at Thammasat University, examined who could be excluded from AI education. He emphasized infrastructure, affordable connectivity, suitable devices, accessibility, local languages, and different levels of digital literacy. He also called for vulnerable communities to participate in the design of education and AI policies.

Together, these contributions suggest that inclusion belongs in the initial design of an initiative. The circumstances of intended participants shape what can be delivered and what they can gain from it.

Ng Yuen Yan, Assistant Branch Manager at HSBC and a mentor to university students, provided a concrete example. She described taking engineering students to a charity clinic in the Philippines, where they encountered paper-based processes, repeated registration steps, and limitations that affected the use of their proposed technology.

The team had to adapt its solution to work offline, using a basic Excel database.

For project practitioners, the example makes the importance of discovery and adaptation tangible. Technical skills became useful through observation of the clinic’s operations, attention to users, and a willingness to revise the proposed solution. The account illustrated that design process; it did not establish a measured long-term improvement in the clinic’s performance.

Other speakers examined the professional responsibilities surrounding AI use.

Marina Watt, Co-Founder of Brandstorm Communications, proposed a review process for AI-assisted communication built around five questions: purpose, evidence, whose voice is represented, transparency, and accountability. She emphasized that meaningful oversight requires the knowledge, time, and authority to challenge or reject content.

Bryan Law, Professor at Fox College of Business, raised concerns about confidential information, intellectual property, and the need to follow organizational policies when using AI.

Poomintr Sooksripaisarnkit, Lecturer in Maritime Law at the University of Tasmania, discussed verification and professional reasoning in legal work. He explored the potential role of oral assessment while acknowledging the workload it creates for educators. His contribution highlighted a practical implementation challenge: a stronger assessment method must also be feasible to deliver.

Daphne Chun-Ping Lan, Founder of Talents Gone Wild, focused on how organizational intentions become everyday behavior. Drawing on her experience in enterprise communications, she emphasized clear boundaries and frequent conversations between managers and employees about experimentation, progress, and difficulties.

These contributions place human responsibility within the design of the work itself: who can decide, who checks the evidence, who supports learning, and who remains accountable afterward.

The student perspectives gave that responsibility a personal dimension.

Lai Wing Ching, Audrey, a student at City University of Hong Kong, described the difference between studying communication and being entrusted with operations for a youth speaking event. Real responsibility challenged her confidence and gave her an opportunity to apply what she had learned. She also described intercultural understanding as something developed through relationships and actions.

Chi Yu Ling, a student at Washington High School, shared how sustained curiosity about the Sustainable Development Goals had led to research and opportunities to contribute to wider discussions. Her request to educators and adults was direct:

“Please guide us, but don’t decide everything for us.”

Both contributions showed why youth participation should include opportunities to influence the work and take responsibility for it.

For project and program leaders, the discussion suggests four questions to bring into the design and review of an initiative:

• What need are we addressing? Understand the people, workflows, resources, and constraints before choosing a solution.

• What capability will participants demonstrate? Identify evidence of applied learning, judgment, and performance.

• Who has responsibility and authority? Make ownership, review, support, and decision-making clear throughout implementation.

• What changes after delivery? Follow up on benefits, access, continued use, and participants’ ability to act with greater confidence and independence.

These questions connect with PM4TheWorld’s focus on measurable social impact through professional project management. They also offer a practical starting point for applying the webinar’s ideas: select a bounded initiative, define the intended benefit, involve the people it serves, and test whether the evidence supports extending it.

In her closing remarks, ESGIN Founder Chienie Tsai encouraged participants to build communities of learning and support around them. That invitation gives the conversation a useful next step.

Future intelligence will take shape through the decisions institutions make and the opportunities they create for people to learn, exercise judgment, and contribute. Projects and programs provide a way to put those intentions into practice—and to examine whether they are producing the human benefits they promise.