"L'intelligenza artificiale è come un piemontese: falsa e cortese."
AI is like someone from Piedmont: polite, yet not entirely sincere.
If you are not Italian, you may need a local to explain why that lands.
If you are, you already know exactly what it means.
That was one of the opening lines of an exceptional talk I attended last week in Saluzzo (Piedmont!), on AI and what it means to remain human in the age of intelligent machines.
Formally introduced by Michela Boero, the keynote was delivered by
Luca Peyron: a parish priest, theology professor, lecturer, TED speaker, author and thinker with a deep interest in technology, space and artificial intelligence.
That single idea reframed everything that followed.
AI is a "macroscopio".
After the microscope, which let us see smaller, and the telescope, which let us see farther, AI lets us see more: across more variables, more connections and more complexity, faster than before.
But what he said next is the part I keep coming back to.
AI removes effort. But some effort is the effort of being human.
The thinking we do to reach a conclusion is not overhead to optimise away.
It is how judgement gets built.
Use AI well, and it can sharpen that judgement. Use it carelessly, and you progressively stop thinking, one small delegation at a time.
He was careful to add that this is not a case against the tool. Similar fears were once raised about calculators and arithmetic, and many of those fears proved overstated.
The difference now is that AI does not just compute. It drafts, recommends, interprets and increasingly shapes decisions.
That changes what is actually being handed over.
In procurement, this is not abstract.
The job is reading a supplier's hesitation in a negotiation. Sensing when a cost breakdown does not match the story behind it. Knowing which clause in a contract is the one that actually matters.
AI can support all of that.
It cannot replace the years that built the instinct.
The tool is genuinely useful.
The discipline of still doing your own thinking is what keeps it that way.
#ArtificialIntelligence #Procurement #SupplyChain #Leadership