The business-economics literature, beginning with the studies of Gino Zappa and continuing through the 1970s, offers extraordinarily valuable interpretive insights for understanding the evolution of the modern business environment and for interpreting the impact of artificial intelligence on the economics of firms. Because of its complexity and uniqueness, the “azienda” does not allow to adopt such a level of abstraction as to make standardizable the complex processes that underlie the mechanisms of decision-making, action and control: each company is a unicum of relationships, behaviours, experiences, dynamics, histories and contexts, which cannot be brought back to algorithms, however intelligent, capable of determining its conduct at all organizational levels. It is, moreover, an instrument in the hands of humans, who remain the unquestioned creators, sure protagonists and ultimate recipients of corporate action. Any form of “delegation” of operational, decision-making and cognitive processes that, in whole or in part, have, in the past, belonged to man, cannot take place without ensuring, under the highest moral standard, that economic well-being and technological progress are fundamental conditions and, ultimately, instruments for the progress of humanity. Bertini, Zanda and Coda-with the forward-looking perspective of their studies and in full coherence with the Italian businesseconomics tradition, not only anticipated the challenges that, today, are at the heart of the fourth industrial revolution, but also outlined an ethical path for navigating them, emphasizing that true progress is not that which detaches itself from the human but that which enhances its potential in harmony with the new possibilities offered by technological progress, implicitly re-proposing the warning not to confuse innovation and its applications with the complexity of values encompassed in human action, since the former are and remain means at the service of knowledge without ever becoming its automatic substitutes.
KEYWORDS: Artificial Intelligence, human capital, digital society
