This month's newsletter carries two conversations that, at first glance, may seem to belong in separate rooms. One is a recap of our Conference "Legacying Together", a gathering that asked how enterprising families carry meaning, purpose, and identity across generations. The other is about artificial intelligence.
We believe they belong in the same room. In fact, they may be part of the same conversation.
Artificial intelligence is quickly moving from the margins of business education to the center. At Columbia Business School, that shift is visible and deliberate. The School recently launched its AI in Business Initiative to advance research, education, and industry collaboration on how AI is transforming organizations. In June, Columbia will also convene "The MBA Transformed: AI and Beyond," a teaching symposium focused on AI enthusiasm, skepticism, and examples of excellence in MBA pedagogy. These are not peripheral experiments. They reflect a genuine institutional commitment to preparing leaders for a world where AI is not coming. It is already here.
For family enterprises, this shift raises a deeper question. Is AI simply another tool to improve efficiency, automate decisions, and accelerate innovation? Or does it touch something more sensitive: the way families define judgment, control, continuity, and legacy?
That question feels especially resonant as we reflect on this year's Conference. Legacy is often imagined as something received from the past and preserved for the future. Yet in practice, legacy is rarely static. It is interpreted, questioned, renewed, and sometimes reauthored across generations. In that sense, AI may not only challenge legacy. It may also become one of the new spaces where legacy is coauthored.
The ability to adopt AI may depend less on the technology itself and more on the quality of relationships, the clarity of governance, and the willingness of family leaders to turn legacy into a living conversation.
A recent study in the Journal of Product Innovation Management helps illuminate this tension. The article, "AI Adoption in Family Firms: A Mixed-Methods Study on the Paradoxical Roles of Passive and Active Family Involvement," examines how family firms adopt AI and why some families move faster than others. The authors studied eight German firms through 125 interviews, then tested their model on survey data from 1,444 German firms.
Their central finding is both simple and provocative: AI adoption in family firms is not only a technology problem. It is also a relationship and governance problem.
The study finds that firms are more likely to adopt AI when they have strong external ties with suppliers, customers, and competitors. This matters because AI is complex, data-intensive, and often difficult to fully understand. Few firms can build all the necessary expertise internally. Trusted suppliers can help test AI applications and share technical knowledge. Customers can help firms understand where AI improves the experience and where it creates discomfort. Even competitors can become learning partners when firms need to share risks, build standards, or explore uncertain technologies together.
The most interesting insight, however, concerns family involvement. The authors distinguish between passive family ownership and active family management. Passive family ownership means the family owns the business but is not directly involved in management. Active family management means family members hold executive roles and participate in strategic decisions. The study suggests that these two forms of involvement can have opposite effects. Passive family ownership may slow AI adoption, while active family management may support it, especially when firms are learning through strong supplier relationships.
Why would ownership slow adoption? Family owners may worry about:
- Losing control as decision-making shifts from people to systems
- Exposing sensitive knowledge through data-sharing with outside partners
- Disrupting trusted relationships built over generations
- Weakening the family identity embedded in how the business operates
These concerns are understandable. For families that have built a business over generations, these risks are not only economic. They are emotional and symbolic.
Yet the same article shows that active family managers can help firms adopt AI more effectively. When family members are close to operations, they can:
- Translate family values into practical AI experimentation
- Leverage long-standing supplier and customer relationships to build trust around new technology
- Make faster decisions when the family has clarity about its priorities
- Frame AI not as a betrayal of the past, but as a way to protect the future
This is where the legacy connection becomes powerful.
AI may become a voice of the next generation, not because younger family members automatically understand it better, but because it gives them a concrete way to participate in the future of the enterprise.
If legacy means preserving exactly what previous generations built, AI may appear as a threat. It may seem to challenge human judgment, personal relationships, and the family's way of doing business. But if legacy means carrying forward the family's purpose, values, and capacity to contribute across generations, AI may become a tool for renewal.
The next generation may have a distinctive role here. Not because younger family members automatically understand AI better, but because AI gives them a concrete way to participate in the future of the enterprise. They can help the family ask better questions:
- Where can AI augment human judgment without replacing it?
- Which decisions must remain deeply human?
- What data should we protect?
- Which relationships can help us learn safely?
- How do we experiment without losing ourselves?
In this sense, AI can become a voice of the next generation. It can create an opening for younger family members to contribute not only technical fluency, but also a new imagination for continuity. The shift is from a defensive posture, "How do we protect what we inherited?", to a generative one: "How do we coauthor what comes next?"
This does not mean every family firm should rush into AI. The study itself has limits. Its data are based on German firms, and the survey predates the current wave of generative AI. The findings should not be treated as a universal formula. But the article offers a valuable insight for family enterprises everywhere: the ability to adopt AI may depend less on the technology itself and more on the quality of relationships, the clarity of governance, and the willingness of family leaders to turn legacy into a living conversation.
As Columbia Business School deepens its engagement with AI, our community faces a parallel challenge. The question is not only how to use AI. The deeper question is how to use it in ways that strengthen judgment, deepen learning, and invite multiple generations into the work of continuity. At the Global Family Enterprise Program, we will continue to explore this topic more deeply in the fall, creating space for families, students, alumni, and advisors to ask what AI means not only for business performance, but for ownership, legacy, governance, and the future families are coauthoring together.
AI may threaten legacy when it is treated as a substitute for values, relationships, and human responsibility. But it may help coauthor legacy when families use it to learn together, ask better questions, and build the future with intention.
A few questions worth bringing into your next family conversation
- Where does AI currently feel like a threat to your family, ownership group, or enterprise?
- Which parts of your legacy should remain deeply human, relational, and judgment-based?
- Where could AI help the next generation contribute meaningfully to the future of the enterprise?
- Which trusted relationships, with suppliers, customers, advisors, peers, or even competitors, could help your family learn about AI more safely?
- Are your governance structures designed to protect the past, or to help the family responsibly coauthor the future?
These questions do not ask families to choose between legacy and innovation. They ask something more demanding: they bring us back to the heart of Legacying. As we explored during the conference, Legacying Together is what happens when a family has the courage to reinterpret its past, present, and future across generations. AI will not coauthor the future for enterprising families. But it may become one of the spaces where generations learn how to coauthor that future with greater clarity, responsibility, and imagination.