How do you prepare leaders for a world where the nature of work is changing faster than ever? Dr. Michael Arena believes the answer combines AI-powered learning with a renewed focus on what makes us human, anchored in biblical principles.
Michael is dean of the Crowell School of Business at Biola University. Before that, he was vice president of talent at Amazon Web Services, where he also led an organizational research team studying how high-performing teams work, and chief talent officer at General Motors. He has been a visiting scientist at the MIT Media Lab, working alongside AI pioneers Rosalind Picard and Sandy Pentland about a decade before AI reached the mainstream.
In this episode, James Poulter talks with Michael about rebuilding education for the AI era, what Amazon's team and decision-making practices can teach ministries, and the biblical principles he's helping develop for AI.
AI will transform how we learn knowledge, so business education must go deeper on the human skills machines can't model, and move faster on everything else.
Technology is now under and around everything we do, Michael says. If you aren't preparing future leaders to be at least junior technologists, you're ill-equipping them for the future.
He believes education is ripe for disruption. Some things must remain, like the Socratic method, critical thinking and ethical judgment. But the knowledge-transfer part is about to be redesigned. Biola's new adaptive MBA tackles both sides:
The shift is real. At Amazon, Michael says, the biggest constraint on meeting customer demand was software engineering capacity, and he used to tell people to get a software development degree. That's changed.
The bottom of the career pyramid will shrink, but Michael isn't convinced entry-level roles will vanish, and he's more worried about losing seasoned judgment.
For students, the front door to a career will be harder to find. So Biola is bringing business into the classroom: real business challenges in the curriculum and career pathways not just to jobs but to organizations. You can't wait until you're in business to start operating like a business leader.
For employers, he sees it cutting both ways. AI-fluent junior people may be pushed into middle management sooner, a kind of "juniorification" that could give newcomers a competitive edge. The bigger risk is losing seasoned veterans with strong critical judgment and deep knowledge of the business. How organizations balance junior and senior talent over the next five to ten years will be fascinating to watch.
Small, focused teams move fast and innovate boldly, but organizations also need larger teams that provide stability, and AI will make the fast teams even smaller.
At AWS, Michael's team studied what happens when you remove an organizational layer, change spans of control or use different kinds of teams. One famous concept is Amazon's two-pizza team. As the story goes, someone asked Jeff Bezos how Amazon could communicate more efficiently. He replied that he didn't want them to communicate more efficiently; he wanted them to communicate less.
The idea: a small group of five or six people, small enough to feed with two pizzas, singularly focused under a single-threaded leader. They don't create "work about work," which Michael says can consume around 65% of our time. They just do the work.
But two-pizza teams don't fit everything. In a paper he recently co-wrote, Michael describes a speed-stability continuum. Small teams are ideal for speed and bold innovation. Larger, cross-functional teams, with risk, legal and HR in business or various ministry leaders in a church, provide stability. Developers ask whether something can be done; these teams ask whether it should be done, and how.
As AI agents join the work, he expects the fast teams to shrink further: "It may actually be a one-pizza team, because robots don't eat." The art for ministries building tech is knowing where you need speed and where you need stability, and getting the benefit of both.
Good decision-making means matching how much consensus you seek to how reversible and risky a decision is.
Groupthink is a real danger, Michael says. You need to slow down enough to consider every angle, but not so much that nothing ships. He points to two useful mental models:
Ministries can learn a lot from these mechanisms. Consensus matters most when there's serious risk or when a decision could radically shift a ministry's vision. It's not just about team structure; it's also about decision authority, intent and purpose.
In a fast-changing world, organizations can't run on top-down policy; they need clear principles that free people closest to the work to make good judgment calls.
Asked whether leadership must change with AI as a "cybernetic teammate," in Ethan Mollick's phrase, Michael says absolutely. Any of us could be wrong about where things will be in two or five years. As the outside world speeds up, organizations must too, and that can't come through hierarchy and bureaucracy. Leaders still matter: they break ties, make final calls and allocate resources. But people on the front lines see what's happening day to day.
That's why he values principles like Amazon's leadership principles. They exist to force high judgment and fast, local decisions, and they deliberately pull against each other. "Think big" asks you to be bold and disruptive; "dive deep" asks you to master the details. Held in tension, they push leaders to think boldly without being reckless, and to stay close enough to the details to know the idea can be executed. As Andy Jassy has put it, the principles are a system in constant tension, and that tension creates a better third way.
Principles are also freeing, Michael adds. Without them, people operate defensively, worried about what three layers up will think. With them, top-down strategy meets bottom-up energy, and people can get on with the work.
Michael and James are part of a group developing seven principles to help ministry leaders benefit from AI while protecting what it means to be made in God's image.
AI can help ministries scale and reach the world in ways we can hardly imagine. The question is how to embrace that while protecting human dignity. The seven principles under development are rooted in what it means to be created in God's image, written as value statements any ministry leader can use to evaluate an AI implementation.
Michael shares two examples:
Like good management principles, the goal is to practice AI wisely while staying fiercely anchored in God's Word. Read the Missional AI Standards and Ethics.
Michael's Missional AI 2025 keynote, "AI vs Human Identity: What Makes Us Uniquely Human?", explores the question at the heart of this conversation. You can find it in the Missional AI Video Library under Dallas 2025 Keynotes.
Where this episode covers leadership, teams and education, the keynote goes deeper into human identity in the age of AI, the foundation for the biblical principles he describes here. Watch it alongside this episode for the full picture.
Listen to the full episode with Dr. Michael Arena on the Missional AI Podcast, and subscribe so you don't miss future conversations.
Interested in the work on biblical principles for AI, or Gloo's flourishing work? Find details in the episode show notes, and stay connected with the Missional AI community at missional.ai.
This episode was made possible in partnership with Gloo, the technology platform connecting the faith ecosystem.