Speaker
Description
Digital leadership is emerging as the decisive competence of our time — the ability to align human insight, computational capacity, and organisational purpose in a world shaped by. This session explores what it means to lead when cognition, creativity, and computation are increasingly interwoven.
Far from being a technical role, digital leadership represents a new epistemic orientation — one that combines systems intelligence, ethical discernment, and strategic agility to navigate the accelerating feedback loops between human decision-making and machine learning. It requires leaders to cultivate literacies that span from data ethics and digital inclusion to the responsible deployment of AI and HPC infrastructures.
Drawing from applied research and practice at the UWC CoLab for e-Inclusion and Social Innovation and the Samsung-funded Future-Innovation Lab, the presentation will examine how digital leadership is being developed within South Africa’s higher-education and innovation ecosystems. It will illustrate how next-generation leaders are being prepared to operate at the interface of human capability development, institutional transformation, and computational scale — where digital foresight becomes a form of national competence.
Ultimately, the session argues that digital leadership is not about mastering technology but about shaping the conditions under which technology serves human and societal flourishing in the era of artificial intelligence.
