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The New Influence War: How AI Could Hack Democracy

What the rise of AI swarms reveals about the future of influence, information, and democratic resilience. Listen to this article: 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 Science paper “How Malicious AI Swarms Can Threaten Democracy,” Amit […]

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The Power of AI Stopping Agents

When Machine Learning Meets Sales Psychology Listen to this article: Conventional sales wisdom treats persistence as virtue: stay in the conversation, overcome objections, keep the line alive. But recent research into the dynamics of sales conversations suggests that our bias toward persistence leads to a massive misallocation of resources. In “Learning When to Quit in […]

Is GenAI Heading for a Tech Monopoly?

New research on how the competitive dynamics that created early tech giants may not repeat in the age of generative AI. For the last two decades, businesses have operated under the shadow of the Web 2.0 era, where a handful of giants like Google built unassailable tech fortresses. Now, as generative AI transforms every industry, […]

AI Tools That Rewrite How We “See” Stories

Every January, a familiar resolution makes the rounds: “This year, I’m going to read more novels.” You buy a couple of ambitious titles, maybe even join a book club, and for a few weeks it feels great, until life speeds up and the plot starts slipping. Who was that character who vanished for five chapters, […]

The Three Ways Professionals Work with AI – Which One Are You?

Workers have moved past the initial shock of Generative AI’s arrival. The tool is here, it’s accessible, and it might be open in one of your browser tabs right now. But a critical challenge remains: knowing that you should use AI is very different from knowing how to weave it into the complex, interconnected reality […]

The Agentic AI Reality Check

Agentic AI has recently been moving through a period of heightened excitement and innovation, but empirical data on how these tools are actually being used has been scarce. The new study “The Adoption and Usage of AI Agents: Early Evidence from Perplexity,” by Jeremy Yang, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and […]

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Explanations on Mute: Why We Turn Away From Explainable AI

We live in an age where the call for transparent or “Explainable AI” (XAI) has never been louder. Businesses agree, with 85% believing transparency is critical to winning consumer trust. [1] Given this consensus, it seems reasonable to assume that when an explanation for a high-stakes AI decision is available, people will naturally seek it […]

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Navigating the Promise and Peril of AI Companions for Older Adults

What happens when the same technology powering a customer service chatbot becomes a daily companion for someone losing their memory? In the new Nature Mental Health Comment article, “AI Companions for Dementia,” Julian De Freitas, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Associate at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard (D^3), […]

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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 […]

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