Managerial decisions are ideally fully rational, yet cognitive research has long demonstrated how profoundly they are shaped by mental shortcuts, automatic judgment, and overconfidence, effects that grow more consequential the higher one climbs in the organisational hierarchy. To this inherent fragility, a new factor has now been added: artificial intelligence, which can amplify existing distortions by feeding information bubbles and uncritical dependence on algorithms, but which can also, when used with awareness, become a tool for correcting the overconfidence and individualised decision-making typical of senior roles.

Riccardo Viale, Professor of Behavioural Sciences and Cognitive Economics, structures his session in two parts. The first is devoted to a counterintuitive yet well-grounded argument: in complex managerial decisions, expert intuition often outperforms explicit rational analysis.
The second inverts the prevailing debate on artificial intelligence, framing it not as a threat to managerial autonomy, but as a potential corrective to its most persistent limitations: overconfidence, anchoring on established convictions, and the overestimation of one's own judgment.

A session to reconsider one's decision-making practices in light of a more grounded rationality, distributed across mind, body, and algorithm.
Participants will come away with:

• tools to recognise overconfidence, anchoring, and other recurring cognitive traps in their managerial decisions
• concrete criteria for knowing when to rely on intuition, when on analytical deliberation, and when on AI support
• the ability to distinguish when artificial intelligence enhances judgment and when it replaces it
• practical guidance for integrating artificial intelligence into individual and team decision-making processes.