Leading with AI 2026
In-person: May 14-15, 2026
Virtual: May 19, 2026
Because AI
is only half the answer
“If your workers aren’t frustrated using AI, then you’re nowhere near where you should be.”
Mary ErdoesSir Martin Sorrell , D^3 Advisory Council Member and CEO of JPMorgan Asset and Wealth Management
Because AI
is a superpower
From the D^3 Associates Program
The impact of generative AI on the economy depends on the speed and intensity of its adoption. D^3 Associate David Deming, Danoff Dean of Harvard College and Isabelle and Scott Black Professor of Political Economy at Harvard Kennedy School, along with colleagues at Vanderbilt, the Harvard Project on Workforce, and the Federal Reserve Bank of St. Louis, have built this tracker to report results from a series of nationally representative U.S. surveys of GenAI use at work and at home.
Back to the Beginnings of AI at Work
What a Landmark AI Study Tells Us About When to Trust, and When Not to Trust, AI Listen to this article: In September 2023, a working paper out of Harvard Business School landed at an unusually consequential moment. Generative AI had been publicly available for less than a year, organizations were scrambling to understand its […]
80 Apps in One Afternoon: What the Frontier Firm Initiative Is Already Building
The Frontier Firm AI Initiative was designed around a simple conviction: the most important questions about AI in business can’t be answered in theory. Listen to this article: On Wednesday, March 11, 2026, senior leaders from across the Frontier Firm AI Initiative came together at Harvard Business School for Journey to the Frontier, an event […]
The Surprising Link Between AI Reasoning and Honesty
Exploring how the complexity of large language models acts as a moral safeguard Listen to this article: The standard fear about advanced AI goes something like this: the more sophisticated a system becomes, the better it gets at sounding convincing, reading the room, and manipulating people. A model that can reason step-by-step might not just […]
Why Your AI Strategy May Be Failing
How companies can overcome the structural frictions that block AI at scale Listen to this article: AI has entered the enterprise faster than most previous waves of technology, reshaping expectations about speed, productivity, and decision-making. Yet adoption alone does not produce transformation. The Frontier Firm Initiative (FFI), a joint effort between the Digital Data Design […]
The Hidden Economics of Workplace AI
As AI learns directly from how people work, a new tension is emerging about expertise, power, and governance. Listen to this article: In many workplaces, the newest addition to virtual meetings isn’t a colleague, but an AI assistant like Granola or Otter. Suddenly no one has to scramble for action items or wonder who said […]
Because AI
transforms productivity
Written By
Nova School of Business & Economics
“…what’s different is the promise of this technology. AI has the capabilities of summarizing and allowing people to access tacit knowledge that is typically, you know, exclusive to experts.”
Raffaella Sadun John Winsor , Co-Principal Investigator at the Digital Reskilling Lab
Competing in the Dark
New research reveals that firms are playing a game of catch-up they didn’t even know they were losing Listen to this article: Leaders know they must innovate to survive, and they don’t make decisions in a vacuum: they watch rivals, draw inferences, and position themselves accordingly. But what happens when their picture of the competitive […]
Can You Spot the Bot?
New research reveals just how convincingly AI mimics humans Listen to this article: Alan Turing’s original “imitation game,” proposed in 1950, had an elegant simplicity: a human judge conducts a text-based conversation with two hidden parties—one human, one machine—and tries to guess which is which. Today, the question Turing posed has quietly expanded into territory […]
Because AI
changes everything
Leading with AI 2026
While AI represents the most powerful wave of innovation in a generation, public sentiment toward it is increasingly polarized and weary. Many workers feel that AI is being done to them, not for them. The dominant feeling across much of the American workforce is disenchantment, the sense that they played by the rules, but the […] Continue reading Leading with AI 2026
Our digital future is being invented today
Our work at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard focuses our 14 labs around six communities of practice to produce and share research-rooted knowledge on how society and business are interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies.