While the corporate world obsesses over AI’s efficiency gains, Associate Professor Lynn Gribble is teaching future leaders to focus on something entirely different – how to use the technology to make the world better.
Sometimes a seemingly small decision can change a person’s entire world view.
For Associate Professor Lynn Gribble, School of Management and Governance at UNSW Business School, joining the inaugural cohort of Sydney Leadership in 1999 was that kind of decision.
“It was a type of ‘social MBA’ that looked at how we could build a more resilient society,” she explains. “It changed how I saw the world. It said to me, if we're not making a better world, then we're making it worse. You always have to look to make the world better.”
Since then, this philosophy had guided everything she does – whether that’s running a low- to no-waste household or teaching university students about management.
And her award-winning course at UNSW is helping prepare future leaders to navigate the complexities and societal implications of AI deployment responsibly.
While AI has incredible potential to change the world for the better, its human, societal and environmental costs must also be considered. Its use increases electricity and water consumption, its categorisation training relies on an exploited workforce and has the potential to shift deep understanding to surface-level knowledge.
As a leader in digital innovation in education, Associate Professor Gribble is an early adopter and authoritative voice in AI, bringing a responsible lens to the subject. Having spent years studying how technology reshapes organisations and people, she urges students and leaders to think beyond the AI dividend of efficiency or time saved.
“We need to think about the impact of the technology and ask the big questions,” Associate Professor Gribble explains.
“Is it better to have a job than not? Not always. Not if it's modern slavery.
Or if AI lets us work four times faster, should we only have five people instead of 20? That’s economic rationalism, not responsible management.”
Associate Professor Gribble’s career spans industry roles across HR, learning and development, corporate coaching and more than 20 years as a digital innovator in education.
This integrated background collectively shapes her approach to teaching, combining industry pragmatism, creative and coaching-based facilitation, pedagogy‑first, tech-enabled design, and a deep, values-driven focus on sustainability and responsible management.
In her Managing myself and others in an AI-enabled workplace course, students explore the intersection of work, management practices and AI.
By embedding sustainability, equity, and organisational impact into their learning, Associate Professor Gribble teaches students how to harness technologies to manage themselves and their workforce responsibly. The course recently won the UNSW Business School SDG Showcase Judge’s Award for Education.
“My job is to open the box, shed some light on it, get people to play around with what's inside it, facilitate some uncomfortable truths so we can ask ourselves the question of what sort of society do we want to create and live in?”
According to Associate Professor Gribble, putting faces to the technology’s impact is the best place to start.
“Most AI is being coded by Kenyan workers who are underpaid, have no rights and are being exposed to harmful images,” she says.
“Students start by watching a video about this. It’s a big turning point for them because they don't often think about how the technology is made and how it’s maintained. It puts the responsibility fairly and squarely in their laps."
From there, students then learn to declare their AI use and examine how it shaped their thinking.
They shift their focus from efficiency to customers, strategy and impact through weekly projects and hackathons mapped to the SDGs, including equality and gender equity, life on land and life below water. Projects range from placing AI within an organisational chart to scenario planning what the workforce of the future might look like
“I want students to understand that as future leaders they have an ethical and moral responsibility to think about how they can improve things for everyone,” Associate Professor Gribble says.
Beyond AI’s environmental and human impact, another fundamental risk emerges, according to Associate Professor Gribble.
“It lets us consume information in a curated conversational way, which makes it less dense and easier to understand. But it comes with the risk of people thinking they're an expert, when they've only touched the surface,” she says. “Making a cake from a cake mix doesn’t make you a master baker.”
Her course is designed to mitigate this. It encourages students to question the information they read and recognise their own limitations, rather than accept things at face value.
“AI gives us time to think about how it can make a more equal world. But this requires people to engage with it intellectually and ask, “What if the opposite was true?”, she says.
As an early adopter of technology, Associate Professor Gribble is optimistic about AI.
“This post-digital world is about human flourishing, where we're not doing busy work anymore. We're doing the really deep, intellectual, creative, considered things. And that is where the potential lies,” she says.
But unlocking that potential requires rethinking who gets to access it and on what terms.
“Giving the same ladder to a five-foot person as we give to everyone else means they still won’t reach the top. They need a different ladder. What they do once they get to the top is up to them, but getting there shouldn’t be what stops them,” Associate Professor Gribble says.
The leaders emerging from her course will not only be equipped to work in the new world of work – they’ll also be able to shape it for the better.