Most executive education still follows a familiar script. Leaders gather at a business school, debate a case, admire a framework, and return to work intellectually stimulated but operationally unchanged. The case protagonist always seems bolder, clearer, and more decisive than anyone ever feels back at the office.
That model assumes insight automatically converts into action. For today’s executives, it rarely does.
In a world shaped by AI, public scrutiny, and real-time accountability, leadership credibility no longer depends on how confidently a story is told. It depends on whether a claim can survive exposure to data, scepticism, and comparison. Authenticity has ceased to be a communication challenge. It has become an evidence problem.
This is the premise behind The Authenticity Lab, a collaboration between Isentia and the ESSEC-Mannheim EMBA Program. Rather than treating the classroom as a forum for discussion, the Lab treats it as a pressure test. Not a branding workshop. Not a focus group. A controlled environment where corporate claims are examined against live data, AI-assisted analysis, and disciplined questioning.
From Classroom to Lab
The Lab begins with a constraint many executives rarely face: uncomfortable input.
Participants worked with the Isentia Sustainability Dataset, comprising more than 200,000 organic conversations from the previous month across over 20 global sources, including TikTok, Instagram, Reddit, Facebook, reviews, and X. At that scale, it becomes difficult to hide behind a single viral anecdote or a carefully selected data point. Patterns assert themselves.
Executives from aviation, finance, luxury, consulting, tourism, mobility, gaming, and manufacturing were asked to interrogate not a hypothetical case, but the credibility of sustainability claims in their own industries. They combined social narrative analysis, credible secondary research, and AI-driven pattern recognition.
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Then came the most important step: challenging the AI.
Modern AI tools reward speed, fluency, and plausible confidence. They also reward weak questions. When prompts are soft or leading, outputs can sound insightful while quietly reinforcing existing assumptions. By making this failure mode visible, the Lab surfaced a new leadership risk: synthetic confidence produced at scale.
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Each participant translated findings into a simple structure: What. So What. Now What. No more than ten slides. The constraint was deliberate. It forced decisions about what evidence mattered and which claims could not be defended.
To facilitate intellectual risk-taking, discussions were conducted under the Chatham House Rule. When reputational performance is removed from the room, honesty improves. So does learning.
What Authenticity Really Requires
Across industries, a consistent pattern emerged. Audiences grant authenticity only when three elements work together:
- A concrete benefit for a clearly defined community
- Cultural resonance with how that community understands value
- Operational proof, where the system behind the claim is visible and credible
Absent any one of these, trust erodes quickly.
Four Places Where Authenticity Breaks
1. Tourism and the Label Trap
Drawing on prior experience in the tourism sector, Sebastian Blattler, Managing Director APAC, Boschung Group, examined the credibility of Swiss sustainability certifications. The base assumption was straightforward: a national Swiss label would, on its own, signal trust. Social media narratives challenged this quickly. Trust increased only when the label was linked to tangible benefits for local communities and visible respect for local heritage. The environmental promise mattered, but it was not sufficient in isolation. The insight was clear: authentic sustainability communication cannot expect the label alone to do the work. Local impact, cultural relevance, and relatable data must be part of the claim.
2. Consulting and the Advice Footprint
Giovanna Vivoli, a Senior Consultant with Kantar Consulting reframed sustainability authenticity in a way that runs counter to conventional consulting narratives. In professional services, the meaningful sustainability footprint is not office recycling or internal pledges. It is whether the advice delivered measurably improves a client’s real-world sustainability outcomes. If influence is the product, then authenticity resides in results. This creates a distinct burden of proof, sharply separating credible consulting from generic, AI-generated outputs and “restech” solutions that sound responsible but change little.
3. Mobility and the System Gap
Thomas Vacher, Regional Sales Manager, Thales Asia Solutions Pte Ltd., identified a critical mismatch between consumer narratives and expert definitions of sustainability. Public social conversations frame electric vehicles as a product story, focused on the car, the badge, and the promise of clean travel. Industry experts define sustainability as a system story involving battery lifecycle, charging infrastructure, grid composition, and policy. This gap creates risk. Sustainability messaging often sounds like a product capability, while proof depends on an invisible system that specialists can readily interrogate. When that system level reality surfaces, credibility can unravel quickly.
4. Luxury and the Permission to Be Unfinished
Minyoung Seo, Logistics Manager, LVMH Fragrances and Cosmetics Singapore, mapped Gen Z expectations within the luxury sector and surfaced a paradox that is both demanding and forgiving. Perfection is not required, but honesty is non-negotiable. Narratives around repair, reuse, resale, and explicit acknowledgement of what remains unsolved resonated more strongly than polished claims of completeness. The implication is counterintuitive for luxury brands: trust may be rebuilt not by promising more, but by showing the work in progress and openly admitting what is unfinished.
The Real Lesson Was Not Sustainability
Sustainability served as the stress test because it is where audiences are most alert and most exhausted. The deeper lesson, however, was about AI and executive judgement.
AI can compress weeks of scanning into minutes. It can surface patterns worth testing. It can also turn a comfortable assumption into a polished conclusion when questions lack rigour. The risk is not the tool itself, but the illusion of certainty it produces when scepticism is absent.
The pedagogical shift is clear. The Authenticity Lab does not teach executives what to think about authenticity. It teaches them how to audit a claim in a world where fluent answers are cheap, and confidence can be synthetic.
Most executive education ends as private learning. The Authenticity Lab is designed to end as a strategic output. Executives leave with board-ready insight on live claims within their organisations, shaped by cross-industry comparison and triangulated evidence.
What Comes Next
Sustainability was only the beginning. Innovation claims, customer-centricity promises, diversity commitments, and digital transformation narratives can all be subjected to the same pressure test.
Authenticity is not a marketing tone. It is a standard of evidence. Executive education that trains leaders to meet that standard is no longer teaching better storytelling. It is teaching leaders to claim less, ask better questions, and show the proof.
Prashant Saxena is a VP, Revenue at Isentia SEA.
Gautam Kiyawat is a Visiting Professor of Management Practice at ESSEC Business School.
Julien Salanave is a Professor of Management Practice in Entrepreneurship and Innovation at ESSEC Business School.
