For most of my career, intelligence was the quality businesses competed hardest to acquire. Firms chased the smartest graduates, assembled teams of specialists, and accumulated proprietary knowledge wherever they could find it. Information itself was a competitive advantage, and the organizations that knew more — about markets, about counterparties, about risk — tended to win.

Artificial intelligence is changing that equation.

Why Intelligence Is Becoming Abundant

Today’s systems can draft reports, summarize research, analyze financial statements, write code, and generate strategic options in seconds. As those capabilities spread to every desk in every company, access to information and analytical horsepower is becoming democratized. Intelligence, in the sense most organizations have prized it, is becoming abundant. What will remain scarce is judgment.

What Judgment Actually Is

Judgment is the capacity to determine which information actually matters, which recommendations to trust, and which course of action best serves an organization’s long-term interests. It is not the same as raw processing power, and it cannot be reduced to pattern recognition. It draws on experience, context, values, and a hard-won understanding of how people behave under pressure. It is, in the end, the difference between knowledge and wisdom.

Where AI Stops and Judgment Begins

Consider an acquisition. I have spent much of my career evaluating businesses and the people who run them, and I can tell you that a model is now perfectly capable of surfacing innumerable plausible targets, complete with comparable transactions and a defensible valuation range. What it cannot do is read the integrity of a founder across a negotiating table, sense whether two cultures will actually fit once the buzz of the announcement wears off, or know whether this is the right moment to move. It can generate options. It cannot own the consequences of choosing one.

The same is true of nearly every consequential decision an executive makes. Leaders are forever balancing competing priorities: growth against risk, near-term performance against long-term investment, shareholder expectations against employee morale, the pull of innovation against the value of stability. These calls rarely have an objectively correct answer waiting to be calculated. They require judgment — and the willingness to be accountable for it.

Judgment Is Earned, Not Automated

Judgment is also earned. It accumulates through successes and failures, difficult conversations, setbacks no one saw coming, and years of watching how decisions actually unfold once they leave the room. It is shaped by character as much as by experience. Integrity, humility, curiosity, and a genuine willingness to question one’s own assumptions all make for better judgment. There is no shortcut, and I have never met a leader who developed it any faster than the rest of us.

Why AI Raises the Value of Human Judgment

Here is the irony worth sitting with: AI may raise the value of these human qualities rather than diminish it. When everyone has access to the same tools and the same information, advantage no longer comes from producing answers. It comes from asking sharper questions, interpreting results wisely, and making sound decisions in conditions of real uncertainty. The technology levels the analytical playing field. It throws the weight back onto the things that were never going to be automated. I have seen this firsthand in my own work on innovation in public-safety technology, where AI can surface possibilities at remarkable speed, yet the decisions that carry real consequences still come down to human judgment.

Elliott Broidy on the Leaders Who Will Thrive

The leaders who thrive in this era will not necessarily be the ones who lean on artificial intelligence the hardest. They will be the ones who pair its capabilities with distinctly human strengths — wisdom, ethical reasoning, empathy, and the nerve to make a hard call when no algorithm can tell them what is right.

In the years ahead, intelligence will continue to commoditize. Judgment will not. For those of us entrusted with leading organizations through uncertainty, it may prove the most valuable asset of all.