The Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard is now the Harvard Business School AI Institute.

Generative AI and Business Technology

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The AI Race Goes Global

What China’s “diffusion-forward” strategy reveals about technology, production, and who wins in the AI economy Listen to this article: The New York Times recently reported that in Washington, the AI question focuses on whether the government should review powerful models before they are released. But on the other side of the globe, China is asking […]

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The AI Content Problem

How generative AI is reshaping the quantity and quality of expert analysis Listen to this article: We have entered an era of information abundance and trust scarcity. Thanks to AI, it’s easier than ever to generate clean, coherent, professional-sounding content, but some tend to assume that it isn’t worth their attention, confidence, or actual decision-making […]

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Is AI Making Your Team Lazy?

Exploring the hidden cost of human disengagement from AI Listen to this article: We are rapidly entering an AI era defined by the “agentic” shift. These tools now write code, manage inboxes, conduct research, and execute multi-step workflows without a human lifting a finger. But when AI does more, what happens to the humans at […]

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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 […]

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Everyone Has AI. Which Firms are Going to Win?

New research shows that access to AI is not the same as knowing where to use it. Listen to this article: A firm is only as fast as the slowest step in its chain of work. In manufacturing, it might be one particular machine on the line. In software, one overloaded intake service. Many business […]

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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 […]

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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 Harvard Business School […]

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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 […]

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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 […]

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The AI Deep Research Race Has a New Leaderboard

A new cross-domain benchmark reveals how the leading AI research tools perform on real-world production tasks Listen to this article: Two AI-generated research reports land on your desk before a major decision. Both are polished, confidently written, and well-structured, but they reach different conclusions. Which one do you trust, and how would you even begin […]

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