What Dante teaches us about the use of Artificial Intelligence
This vacation, I had some time to revisit the classics. It always amazes me how much of our present we can “see” in stories written centuries ago.
If we analyze the Divine Comedy through today’s technological prism, we find a revealing metaphor about the role of AI and the irreplaceable value of human leadership.
In the work, Dante needs to traverse Hell and Purgatory. To achieve this, he is assigned a guide: Virgil.
Those of us who work daily structuring data, training algorithmic models, or leading digital transformation in our organizations are constantly building “Virgils”. Artificial Intelligence, much like the Roman poet, represents the pinnacle of reason, logic, and accumulated knowledge.
Virgil is the perfect tool to get us out of the chaos (Hell). He maps out the most efficient route, analyzes millions of variables, and gives us the empirical answers we need. He solves the how.
But there is a crucial detail in the story: Virgil cannot enter Paradise.
Get Rafa Valero’s stories in your inbox
Join Medium for free to get updates from this writer.
Pure reason and algorithms, no matter how sophisticated, have a structural limit. They lack lived experiences, they lack their own ethics, and, above all, they lack purpose.
That is where Dante’s second guide comes in: Beatrice.
If Virgil is the predictive algorithm, Beatrice is the consciousness and the executive vision. She represents everything that transcends data:
🎯 The strategic “Why”: AI can give us perfect metrics, but it is the human mindset that decides which metrics truly matter for the organization’s purpose.
🤝 Empathy and Context: A model does not understand team dynamics, resilience in the face of failure, or the emotional nuances that build a high-performance culture.
✨ The Leap of Faith (and the limit of extrapolation): In Machine Learning, when a model tries to predict a scenario outside the historical data it was trained on, we call this “extrapolation,” and that is where the algorithm fails. True innovation is not the logical continuation of the past, but the ability to imagine scenarios that do not yet exist. AI does not know how to extrapolate into the unknown; the human mind does.
In the era of Machine Learning and mass automation, the most common mistake is trying to make Virgil do Beatrice’s job (or vice versa).
Our responsibility as leaders and professionals is not to compete against Artificial Intelligence, but to learn to be better “Beatrices”. We need to cultivate our critical thinking, our executive presence, and our emotional intelligence, letting technology guide us through the calculable so that we can take the leap toward the meaningful.
What do you think? In your current projects, do you feel there is a good balance between the “Virgils” that execute and the “Beatrices” that provide purpose? I look forward to reading your thoughts in the comments. 👇
