Practical Wisdom for Leaders with Scott J. Allen, Ph.D. Humans in the Loop with Dr. Karl Kuhnert
Dec 24, 2025
In a captivating discussion, Karl W. Kuhnert, Ph.D., a leading professor from Emory University, shares insights on how AI can enhance leadership development. He explores the concept of digitizing expert decisions, emphasizing the importance of tacit knowledge as the essence of true expertise. Kuhnert describes innovative tools like the Tacit Object Modeler, which helps in generating personalized clinical scenarios. He advocates for a balanced relationship between AI and human judgment, highlighting that AI is a powerful tool but not a replacement for human wisdom.
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Digitizing An Airport Inspector's Judgment
- Karl Kuhnert describes digitizing an agricultural inspector's decisions at an airport to scale her expertise.
- The inspector hugged him when she saw her decision model and said it freed her to focus on higher-level threat detection.
Tacit Knowledge Is Lived Wisdom
- Karl emphasizes tacit knowledge—'lived wisdom'—as what truly differentiates experts from generic data outputs.
- AI can supply explicit 'what' knowledge, but tacit 'how' and 'when' remain rooted in human experience.
Tom: Capturing A Doctor's Tacit Decisions
- Karl explains creating a Tacit Object Modeler (Tom) to capture physician Dr. Collins' GLP-1 prescribing judgments into scenarios.
- Tom generated hundreds of scenarios, tested the physician, and became a transparent second-opinion tool for other doctors.