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, […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 Harvard Business School AI Institute, discusses how […]
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 […]
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 […]
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 […]
Harvard Business School faculty, in collaboration with Microsoft and its clients, will study human-AI work, publish evidence-based blueprints, and deliver custom workshops for executives to rapidly reinvent global businesses as Frontier Firms; Eli Lilly and Company, EY, Lumen Technologies, and Nestlé among 14 organizations in the inaugural cohort. BOSTON, November 18, 2025 – Faculty at the Harvard Business School AI Institute [1] today […]
As AI systems increasingly outperform humans across a range of tasks, the economic logic seems clear: more capable, more cost-effective AI should lead to widespread automation. The new Harvard Business School working paper, “Performance or Principle: Resistance to Artificial Intelligence in the U.S. Labor Market,” co-authored by Simon Friis, postdoctoral fellow at the Laboratory for […]