Bowdoin College
04/23/2026 | News release | Distributed by Public on 04/23/2026 09:21
What AI Can't Automate: Leadership, Relationships, and the Bowdoin Network
What AI Can't Automate: Leadership, Relationships, and the Bowdoin Network
By Lily Echeverria '26
The second annual Leadership Alumni event at Bowdoin spotlighted the human side of artificial intelligence, emphasizing that "deep relationships" will always be more important than superhuman powers.
From left to right: Eman Okyere '25, Emme McCabe '19, Valerie Wirtschafter '12, Tom Leung '96, and Chris Louie P'27.
On April 14, a panel of alumni working in various industries, all of which lean heavily on AI, gathered with students and staff in Kresge Auditorium to discuss the future of leadership.
The event was organized by Bowdoin's Office of Leadership Development and the Hastings Initiative for AI and Humanity, with a goal of reducing anxiety around the rise of artificial intelligence and increasing students' sense of their own agency, especially as some enter the postgraduate world.
The four panelists were Tom Leung '96, director of product management at Meta; Valerie Wirtschafter '12, a fellow in Brooking's foreign policy, artificial intelligence, and emerging technology initiative; Emme McCabe '19, lead software engineer at Flip; and Eman Okyere '25, a software engineer at Datadog. Moderator Chris Louie P'27, the chief marketing officer at Dye & Durham, directed the discussion.
Before people settled into Kresge Auditorium to listen to alumni speak about the links between AI and leadership, they had the very human experience of sitting around dining tables in Maine Lounge to eat and chat.
The idea to focus this year's leadership event on AI came from PJ Neal '26, one of the student leaders in the Leadership Development office, said Sara Binkhorst, who directs the office.
Neal suggested bringing alumni and students together to wrestle with AI's implications for leadership. Now that the College is equipped with programs such as the Hastings Initiative, "there's this real opportunity for a place like Bowdoin to help shape what 'AI for humanity' can look like," Binkhorst said.
But as more of our workplaces become automated, what will it mean to lead-to inspire, coach, mentor, and support a team made up of people and robots? How essential will qualities like empathy and encouragement be in an age of automation?
Welcoming Back Alumni Leaders
Sara Binkhorst, director of the Director of Leadership Development, launched the Annual Leadership Alumni Event series last year for two main reasons. The first is to recognize and celebrate the "long history of Bowdoin alumni who are out in the world leading in meaningful ways, really across all walks of life," she said.
The second is to help "current students see how the experiences they're having here, both in and out of the classroom, are preparing them to lead," she added. For this event, alumni are invited back to campus to share their reflections about what they took away from those same kinds of experiences.
Each panelist discussed not only how they use AI as a tool, but also the tools they have at their disposal as Bowdoin grads.
"Having good communication and deep relationships with your peers and professors-that's going to carry on throughout your life," McCabe said. She spoke about hiring a Bowdoin graduate from a class below her, and how she was able to assess a few of this person's qualifications based on similar classes they had taken with the same professors. She called it a kind of pre-vetting. "I know a Bowdoin grad will be a good fit," she said.
She then brought up how AI can help professionals focus on what's important at their job, instead of spending time on rote tasks that often clutter the workday.
"That cliche of 'It's who you know, not what you know' will become even more important when AI can automate a lot of those low-hanging tasks. Then those deep relationships are what will really allow you to be a leader," McCabe said.
Discussions around AI's value often leave humanity out of the conversation. This panel sought to amend that, centering its conversation around the leadership qualities that cannot be replaced with AI, but that can improve AI's role in other sectors of life.
Wirtschafter continued this thread, citing a study on Transportation Security Administration (TSA) technology advancements. She acknowledged that this was prior to the government shutdown and TSA frustrations, but still applied to how technology like AI can streamline our lives.
"They surveyed 7,000 people and found that perceptions had improved of TSA at the time of this technological rollout," she said. "But it wasn't because of the technology. It was because it freed up TSA agents to be a little nicer, to show up and pay more attention, because they could offload that rote task."
The panelists all put an emphasis on using technology like AI to your own advantage, and using your own mind to figure out how it can best work for you.
Okyere called AI as "force multiplier," that speeds up the pace of learning. "I don't think it's an either/or situation-it's not either using AI or critically thinking. I think you can combine them and learn more as a result," he said.
"AI is a very powerful engine, but you still need to drive it," Leung reinforced.
In closing, Leung acknowledged the benefits of a liberal arts education, particularly from Bowdoin, when working with AI tools.
"There is a very exciting, positive path to this, and it depends on how quickly you can learn and develop that pattern recognition," Leung said. "I would argue people who graduate from a place like Bowdoin are uniquely advantaged to do that."
Photos by Andrew Estey.
Published April 23, 2026
Bowdoin College published this content on April 23, 2026, and is solely responsible for the information contained herein. Distributed via Public Technologies (PUBT), unedited and unaltered, on April 23, 2026 at 15:21 UTC. If you believe the information included in the content is inaccurate or outdated and requires editing or removal, please contact us at [email protected]