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D^3 Insights & Experiences

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Using AI to Identify Climate Innovation

For decades, the business conversation around climate change has been focused on how to manage, mitigate, and withstand the risks and downsides. But what if there’s a more important story about opportunity that we’ve been missing? In the new article, “Tracking Business Opportunities for Climate Solutions Using AI in Regulated Accounting Reports,” published in Nature […]

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The Science of Digital Flourishing

What if we treated mental health the way we treated physical fitness—not waiting for a crisis, but building strength as a habit? The new working paper “AI for Proactive Mental Health: A Longitudinal, Multi-Institutional Trial,” by a team of authors including Julian De Freitas, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Associate […]

The People, Processes, and Politics of AI ROI

Executives rarely doubt AI’s potential anymore, but many are quietly unsure of their organization’s ability to make it pay off. If you’ve poured time and money into AI pilots and yet the bottom line barely moves, you’re not alone. In the new HBR article “Overcoming the Organizational Barriers to AI Adoption,” Jin Li, Feng Zhu—head […]

Cyber Cube Explosion: A striking visual of a digital cube undergoing a dramatic transformation, with shards of energy bursting outwards, symbolizing innovation and data disruption

Persuasion Bombing: Why Validating AI Gets Harder the More You Question It

Imagine you’ve asked ChatGPT to analyze financial data for a critical business decision. Something about its calculations seems off, so you push back, but instead of acknowledging limitations, the AI doubles down by presenting elaborate justifications with data points and reassuring language. At this point, has the AI won you over? This isn’t a hypothetical […]

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It Feels Like AI Understands, But Do We Care? New Research on Empathy

Picture this: you receive a well-crafted, deeply understanding message about a personal struggle you’ve shared. It acknowledges your emotions, offers thoughtful support, and demonstrates genuine care. Now imagine learning that response came from an AI chatbot, not another human. Would that change how you felt about the interaction? As AI technology grows more sophisticated, LLMs […]

One More Thing… How AI Companions Keep You Online

You don’t just slam a laptop shut on a friend. You say goodbye. That small social ritual turns out to be a powerful behavioral cue for AI companions, and an opportunity to keep you engaged longer. The new working paper “Emotional Manipulation by AI Companions,” co-authored by Julian De Freitas, Assistant Professor of Business Administration […]

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The AI Penalty: What We Really Prize in Empathy

Have you ever received a response from ChatGPT that seems to get you almost too well? A recent preprint review of research, “AI-Generated Empathy: Opportunities, limits, and future directions,” written by a team including Amit Goldenberg, faculty principal investigator in the Digital Emotions Lab at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard (D^3), suggests that […]

Private: The New Influence War: How AI Could Hack Democracy

As we move into the era of agentic AI, what kind of influence will this emerging technology have on democracy and misinformation? In the new paper “How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy,” Amit Goldenberg, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Faculty PI of the Digital Emotions Lab at the Digital […]

Smarter Memories, Stronger Agents: How Selective Recall Boosts LLM Performance

One of AI agents’ most powerful tools is memory: the ability to learn from the past, adapt to new situations, and improve over time. But as organizations and professionals increasingly deploy AI agents for complex and long-term tasks, an important question emerges: how can we ensure that these systems learn from experience without getting trapped […]

Getting Ahead of the Curve: Insights from 3 Years of the Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard

Getting Ahead of the Curve: Insights from 3 Years of the Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard

In the ever-evolving AI landscape, are you truly ready to integrate new technologies effectively, taking advantage of the radical opportunities they present for productivity increases and better operating models? Karim R. Lakhani, Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and faculty chair and co-founder of the Digital Data Design (D^3) […]

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