The Leading and Managing in the Digital Era (LMDE) conference, in its first (2023) and second (2025) editions, examined how data analytics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence were transforming management, business, and education. Since then, the frontier has shifted. AI no longer only informs decisions — through generative and increasingly agentic systems, it plans, coordinates, and executes them. This forces a rethinking of three things at once: how organizations are designed, how work is organized, and where human judgment remains essential. The 2027 conference takes this reinvention as its theme.

As AI-enabled cognitive and analytical capabilities become inexpensive and widely available, the sources of competitive advantage, the boundaries of the firm, and the design of organizations are all in question. When AI systems move beyond producing analysis and content to initiating and executing organizational activity, managers must decide which decisions to delegate, how to allocate authority between people and AI agents, and how to keep human oversight meaningful. Reinventing the organization — rather than merely automating its existing processes — becomes the central strategic challenge.

At the same time, the nature of work and the meaning of expertise are changing. Leaders increasingly work alongside AI that advises, coordinates, and acts, raising hard questions about which judgments should remain human, how professional expertise is formed when machines perform the analytical work, and how careers, skills, motivation, and organizational belonging are sustained. These developments also create a new set of ethics, trust, governance, and accountability issues that cut across every function and every discipline.

The impact extends to business education itself. Business schools are reinventing curricula, pedagogy, and assessment for a world in which AI can produce polished analyses and code, and in which graduates must learn judgment, verification, and the responsible use of powerful tools. Developing the leaders and capabilities required for the age of AI is both a research question and an institutional imperative.

The 3rd LMDE conference brings together leaders and researchers from academia, industry, and government to explore these possibilities and to help shape the organizations, the work, and the leaders of tomorrow.

This is the third LMDE conference, building on the success of the 2023 and 2025 editions. It is unique in bringing together leaders and researchers from industry and academia to discuss new results on management and leadership in the digital era, and the impact of AI on business and on education. It is a special venue because it spans a broad range of disciplines whose common thread is AI, giving participants a genuinely interdisciplinary experience — increasingly needed as a catalyst for innovation and problem solving.

The conference features selected papers presenting innovative research and its business impact, together with discussion papers and panels in which academic and industry leaders share their vision for the future of management and business education. The Syros extension adds original research presentations, meetings with journal editors, networking around funded-research collaborations, professional development workshops, and a doctoral consortium.