23/09/2026
Yesterday, as I left the Responsible Artificial Intelligence in the Military Sphere conference taking place in Soria, I came across a sculpture of Leonor Izquierdo, inviting me to sit in an empty chair.
I couldn’t resist taking the photo the sculpture seems to invite you to take: occupying the chair.
When I got back to the hotel to rest and recharge for the second day of the conference, I found myself thinking about it.
The empty chair makes us think of Antonio Machado (the Spanish poet).
Leonor represented in relation to him. Wife of. Present, but not occupying the chair, even though it is empty.
And it made me think about something less historical and much more current:
Who occupies the seats today from which decisions about the future of our world are being made?
In AI, innovation or organisational transformation, having a diversity of profiles involved in decision-making — and I don’t mean only gender diversity — is not a decorative issue. It broadens the range of challenges we are able to identify, the risks we can anticipate and the solutions we are capable of imagining.
Perhaps a useful question for any organisation is:
Which voices could we still invite into the seats from which decisions are made?
