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.
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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 that brought roughly 100 executives into direct conversation with research shaping the future of their organizations. The Frontier Firm AI Initiative, a collaboration between D^3 and Microsoft, brings together companies like Barclays, DuPont, EY, Mastercard, and Nestle around a shared commitment: don’t just adopt AI, but study the transformation rigorously and share what they learn.
The final session of the day, led by Dr. Rem Koning, Mary V. and Mark A. Associate Professor of Business Administration at HBS and co-director of the Tech for All Lab at D^3, invited participants to do something that might seem surprising at an executive-level event: actually build something. By the end of the session, more than 80 working, no-code software applications had taken shape, each addressing a real challenge faced in their daily lives.
Key Insight: The Barrier to Building Has Disappeared
“The gap between the firms leading AI transformation and everyone else is not closing. It is accelerating.” — Rem Koning
For most of business history, turning an idea into working software meant assembling a team, securing a budget, and waiting. That friction meant most ideas never got off the ground. This session challenged that entirely. Using Lovable, a natural-language app-building platform, participants took the problems they knew best, the ones sitting on their desk every morning, and built tools to address them. One executive created an application that pulls together emails, calendar, and documents each morning and surfaces the handful of decisions that need attention that day. Another built a platform to automate the compliance tracking of fraud claims, the kind of operational infrastructure that would normally require months of engineering work and a dedicated team. In both cases, the gap between having an idea and having a working tool collapsed to an afternoon.
Key Insight: Expertise Is Now the Differentiator
“AI does not replace judgment. It multiplies it. The executives who get the most out of AI are the ones who bring the deepest knowledge of their business to the table.” — Rem Koning
What became clear across the room was that technical confidence wasn’t what separated the most powerful applications from the rest. It was institutional knowledge. The executives who built the most compelling tools were the ones who understood their problem best, because they had been living with it for years.
One participant built a tool that reframes how their sales teams approach client conversations, shifting the focus from narrow questions about AI deployment toward the more valuable question of how work itself should be redesigned. A leader started building an operations hub to bring their contractors, finances, and the entire pipeline into one place, a single tool to replace all the scattered spreadsheets eating up hours of their week. Another leader from financial services began prototyping an internal tool to help their team evaluate AI projects against a governance framework, something that had previously existed only in manual, time-consuming processes. In each case, what made the tool work was not the technology. It was what the person building it already knew.
Why This Matters
For the organizations in the Frontier Firm cohort, this was just one day in a longer journey. For the broader business world, it was a reminder that the window to lead on AI will not stay open forever. AI is no longer something companies adopt from the outside. It is becoming the foundation on which strategy, operations, and decision-making are built. The leaders who understand this will not just have better tools; they will have built something that is genuinely hard to replicate. The competitive advantage of the next decade will not belong to organizations with the best AI strategy on paper. It will belong to the ones with leaders who know how to build.
Meet the Speaker
Rembrand Koning is the Mary V. and Mark A. Stevens Associate Professor of Business Administration in the Entrepreneurial Management Unit at Harvard Business School. He researches and teaches entrepreneurship, exploring how AI is transforming organizations across the globe, from microenterprises in emerging markets to global enterprises. He is co-director and co-founder of the Tech for All Lab at the Digital Data and Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard, and a pioneer in the use of field experiments to study entrepreneurial strategy and innovation.
Watch a video version of the Insight Article here.