Skills Tomorrow's Compliance Leaders Need: A View From the Classroom

What happens to your compliance program when the next generation entering your workforce defines "unethical" not as bribery or fraud, but as a company that flip-flops on its values?

This session brings together host Nick Gallo and Alison Taylor—NYU Stern professor of ethics, sustainability, and professional responsibility, and author of the international bestseller Higher Ground—for a wide-ranging conversation about where the ethics and compliance profession is heading. Drawing on Taylor's front-row view of the next generation entering the workforce, the discussion explores how definitions of "ethical" are broadening, why AI adoption is stalling on a foundation of eroding trust, and how the compliance function can reposition itself from a passive delegation point into a genuine strategic partner. Along the way, the conversation tackles the lessons of the failed ESG era, the distinction between trust and reputation, the collapse of the entry-level career pipeline, and the practical frameworks leaders can use to navigate high-stakes ethical decisions when the "right" answer is anything but clear. The throughline is trust—how it is built, why it is being redesigned, and why the ethics leader may be uniquely positioned to own it.

Key Takeaways

The Expanding Definition of Ethics

• The next generation entering the workforce no longer equates ethics narrowly with fraud, bribery, and corruption, but instead reaches for broader concerns such as environmental responsibility, inclusion, culture, and leadership when asked to describe unethical behavior.

• This broadening means compliance programs anchored solely to traditional FCPA-style pillars risk feeling increasingly disconnected from how employees and future leaders actually understand ethical conduct.

• Ethics and compliance professionals must prepare everyone across the organization—not only those in designated control functions—to understand and navigate this wider terrain of ethical questions.

Retrenchment Is a Strategic Mistake

• Recent research, including a Nordic Business Ethics Alliance report, suggests the compliance field is experiencing a retrenchment toward "back to basics," which Taylor characterizes as a mistake given the current environment.

• As regulation becomes more internationally inconsistent and in some cases directly contradictory, organizations can no longer assume that global rules are broadly converging in the same direction.

• Rather than retreating to the minimum legally required, leaders should position the ethics function strategically at the intersection of regulation, politics, social impact, and culture.

The Ethics Leader as the CEO's Right Hand

• CEOs today face mounting pressure, burnout, elevated stress, and even security threats, creating genuine demand for a strategic ethical voice to help shoulder increasingly difficult decisions.

• There has arguably never been a better opportunity for the right ethics leader to reposition the function from a place where policies are delegated into a trusted advisory role beside the chief executive.

• Seizing this opportunity requires confidence, political capital, and the willingness to bring the CEO the questions that are genuinely keeping them up at night rather than pitching initiatives in a vacuum.

AI Adoption Runs on Trust, Not Mandates

• Every CEO is under enormous board and investor pressure to implement AI rapidly, yet a rising and notably bipartisan backlash from employees and communities is slowing genuine adoption.

• Compelling data shows that 44% of Gen Z are resisting the AI rollout in some form—declining training, avoiding the tools, or mishandling confidential information—signaling that top-down decrees alone will not deliver results.

• Without governance, guardrails, and employee trust that the technology is not simply training a replacement for their jobs, organizations will fail to unlock the innovation, creativity, and competitive advantage they expect from AI.

Lessons from the Failed ESG Experiment

• The ESG era was characterized by an assumption that the private sector could solve systemic societal problems, leading companies to over-promise, adopt too many goals, and rely on shallow data.

• Insufficient attention to political context and the mistaken belief that a company could market or PR its way to solving deep problems ultimately produced widespread greenwashing and backlash.

• The path forward is not doing nothing, but pursuing legitimacy and leverage—focusing on how the business actually makes money and baking ethical considerations into core operations rather than headline claims.

Authenticity Is the New Currency

• Younger employees are highly attuned to detecting empty or performative claims and are exhausted by greenwashing, having lived through the George Floyd era and its aftermath of corporate reversals.

• This generation would rather a company hold a consistent position they disagree with than watch it flip-flop its values depending on who holds political power.

• When a company's sunny external messaging is not mirrored by its policies, HR practices, and actual employee experience, that gap becomes a serious liability—creating an opening for ethics leaders to shape corporate communication.

Trust and Reputation Are Not the Same Thing

• Taylor argues the profession has conflated trust with reputation, when the public does not respond in a logical, linear, or fair way to good-faith corporate effort.

• Because a company may be blamed for something that is not its fault or escape accountability for something that is, reputation can no longer serve as a reliable anchor for trust.

• Leaders must reexamine what trust fundamentally is and design listening functions that build it authentically, rather than relying on the over-committing playbook of the recent past.

The Governance Experience Gap

• The ESG-era shift toward younger, more diverse board members has reversed, with directors over 70 and previously retired CEOs and CFOs returning to provide a "safe pair of hands" amid chaos.

• While understandable, this experienced leadership often lacks fluency in the current political turbulence, the mindset of younger generations, and the confident use of technology and AI.

• Effective ethics leaders can fill this gap by reflecting what is emerging from the bottom of the organization and translating it into constructive guidance for boards and executives who lack that vantage point.

Multiple Lenses Beat a Single Gut Reaction

• Taylor teaches that ethical disagreement usually stems not from one party being unethical and another ethical, but from people reasoning through different philosophical lenses and frameworks.

• Structured exercises—such as debating how to roll out a vaccine through utilitarian, care-based, or worker-prioritizing lenses—demonstrate that harnessing collective intelligence produces better decisions than solitary judgment.

• Executives who initially dismiss ethics as jargon or PR consistently leave these sessions understanding that ethical decision-making can be taught, made practical, and applied to real dilemmas by Monday morning.

The Vanishing Apprenticeship and the Value of Human Judgment

• The elimination of entry-level roles and internships is severing the "rope bridge" that historically carried people from academia into professional life, threatening the pipeline of future talent.

• AI is not clearly delivering efficiency at the manager level; the "workslop" phenomenon floods inboxes with polished-looking output that requires additional labor to verify for accuracy and substance.

• Because judgment, critical thinking, relationships, and trust are capabilities AI cannot replicate, organizations that continue investing in junior talent and human development will win over the long term.

Closing Summary

Across this conversation, a single theme surfaces repeatedly: trust is the foundation on which every other organizational ambition—AI adoption, cultural change, authentic communication, strategic influence—ultimately rests. Taylor's central message is one of opportunity wrapped in challenge. The same forces destabilizing the modern enterprise—regulatory fragmentation, generational shifts in values, AI-driven disruption, and the collapse of old trust mechanisms—are precisely the forces that make a strategic, credible ethics function indispensable.

The leaders best positioned to thrive are those willing to move beyond the traditional compliance remit, to draw on collective wisdom and multiple philosophical lenses, to distinguish genuine trust from fragile reputation, and to bring their CEOs the difficult questions no one else is equipped to answer. The profession's future, in Taylor's framing, belongs not to those who retrench to the basics, but to those bold enough to reposition ethics as the strategic linchpin of the organization.