Eric Abrahamson

Professor Abrahamson is the Hughie E. Mills Professor of Business at Columbia Business School. He explores how artificial intelligence, particularly interactive AI chatbots, help students and executives practice leadership, and exert leadership power and influence at work in a fair and ethical fashion.

Eric Abrahamson's international bestseller, A Perfect Mess, is translated into 18 languages and ranked among Amazon’s top 50 titles. His other book, Change Without Pain, won Strategy + Business magazine’s Best Book Award. His ideas on managing organizational change and on the benefits of moderately disorderly organizational systems have been featured in publications ranging from The New York Times, The Economist, The Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal, to the Harvard Business Review, among others.

An early adopter of computational techniques for analyzing organizational language, Abrahamson's current research focuses on how AI large language models can support leadership development, decision-making, and learning. His current projects combine behavioral science, linguistics, and artificial intelligence to help people navigate high-stakes workplace interactions with greater realism and strategic clarity. Abrahamson is also a leading authority in the study of the creation, spread, use, and rejection of innovative techniques for managing organizations and their employees. He has published his research in the leading scholarly management journals—Administrative Science Quarterly, Academy of Management Journal, Academy of Management Review, Organization Science, among others—and received multiple best-article awards from these journals and from the Academy of Management.

At Columbia, Abrahamson teaches courses on leadership power and political influence, and on leading organizational change. He uses AI chatbots in the classroom to help students road-test the strategies and tactics they learn in class before deploying them in the workplace. He is an avid digital artist who is currently exploring the aesthetic integration of chatbot identity, linguistic style, spoken voice, and 3D dynamic avatars. He grew up in Paris, France, and is perfectly bilingual in French and English.