AI Leadership Workshop – 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.
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 200 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.
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.
Link to the D^3 Insight Article
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