What keeps executives awake at night? Launching DIGI Executive Conversations
DIGI's new Executive Conversations series brings researchers and industry leaders and practitioners together around the challenges shaping organisations today. The inaugural conversation with Bent Dalager focused on AI, organisational transformation, and the questions that connect practice and research.
Artificial intelligence may be advancing at remarkable speed, but for many organisations, the most difficult questions are no longer technological.
They are organisational.
How should work be redesigned when AI becomes abundant and inexpensive? What happens to leadership, governance, and organisational structures? And where does human judgement create the greatest value in an increasingly automated world?
These questions framed the first edition of DIGI Executive Conversations, a new initiative at the Department of Digitalization designed to bring researchers and senior industry practitioners into direct dialogue about the challenges shaping organisations and society.
To open the series, DIGI welcomed Bent Dalager, Partner at KPMG and one of Denmark's most experienced advisors on digital transformation.
Beyond technology
Drawing on CEO surveys and years of experience advising organisations across sectors, Dalager challenged a common assumption in public discussions about AI: that the transformation is primarily about technology.
While new tools continue to emerge at a rapid pace, organisations are increasingly confronting questions that extend far beyond implementation. Business models, governance structures, risk management, organisational capabilities, and leadership practices are becoming central concerns.
One observation stood out during the conversation.
For decades, organisations have designed technology around human work. Increasingly, that logic is being reversed. As AI capabilities become more accessible, organisations are beginning to ask how work should be designed for AI and where human expertise contributes the greatest value.
In this perspective, the capabilities often associated with human uniqueness become increasingly important. Creativity, critical thinking, adaptability, and social intelligence may become not less relevant, but more.
“Bridging academia and practice is not an add-on to our research mission. It is central to it. Through Executive Conversations, we bring researchers and practitioners into the same room to discuss the challenges shaping organisations and society. Those conversations often become the starting point for new research, new partnerships, and ultimately new societal impact.” Andrea Carugati
Head of Departmemt
A conversation between academia and practice
The Executive Conversations format was created to strengthen connections between research and practice.
Rather than traditional guest lectures, the sessions are designed as informal conversations where researchers and practitioners can engage directly with strategic dilemmas, organisational challenges, and emerging developments.
For researchers, the format provides valuable insight into the issues currently shaping decision-making in organisations. For practitioners, it offers an opportunity to engage with a research environment that studies digital transformation, innovation, technology, and organisational change.
The ambition is not simply knowledge dissemination. It is to create a space where questions from practice and questions from research can inform one another.
As discussions unfold, opportunities often emerge for new collaborations, guest engagements, research partnerships, and empirical studies grounded in contemporary organisational challenges.
Strengthening ties with Danish industry
For an international department such as DIGI, Executive Conversations also serve another purpose.
They help strengthen connections with Danish industry and create opportunities for international faculty, PhD researchers, and students to engage directly with organisations operating at the forefront of digital transformation.
The questions discussed in executive offices today frequently become the research questions of tomorrow.
Creating opportunities for those conversations is therefore an important part of DIGI's mission to connect rigorous research with societal and organisational challenges.
With Bent Dalager setting the tone for the inaugural event, the series has already demonstrated the value of bringing researchers and practitioners into the same room.
Additional Executive Conversations are planned for the autumn semester.