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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 […]

Businessman using AI chatbot support on laptop for online customer service

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 […]

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Mastering Change Resilience: The Key to AI-Driven Success

The disconnect between AI’s transformative potential and the actual scale of implementation represents one of today’s most significant organizational challenges. In their new article for the Harvard Business Review, “A Guide to Building Change Resilience in the Age of AI,” Karim Lakhani, Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and […]

Using AI to Serve Patients Better and Reduce Burnout Among Healthcare Providers

Beyond Band-Aids: Using AI to Address Burnout in Healthcare

On May 13, 2025, the Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard held a university-wide Generative AI Symposium in partnership with the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied […]

AI-Driven Optimization: Transforming Refugee Resettlement

On May 13, 2025, the Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard held a university-wide Generative AI Symposium in partnership with the Office of the Vice Provost for Research, the Office of the Vice Provost for Advances in Learning, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, the Harvard John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied […]

Photograph of Bobby Yerramilli-Rao at AI Elevate

AI Elevate: Strategy and the Declining Cost of Expertise

As AI continues to reshape industries globally, the Digital Data Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard and the Harvard Business School Club of the Gulf Cooperation Council hosted AI Elevate: From Readiness to Exponential Growth on December 13, 2024, in Dubai, UAE. This one-day conference provided business leaders, researchers, and government officials with crucial insights into […]

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Teaching Trust: How Small AI Models Can Make Larger Systems More Reliable

As Gen AI technology continues to rapidly evolve and LLMs are integrated into more and more applications, questions of trustworthiness and ethical alignment become increasingly crucial. In the recent study “Generalizing Trust: Weak-to-Strong Trustworthiness in Language Models,” authors Martin Pawelczyk, postdoctoral researcher at Harvard working on trustworthy AI; Lillian Sun, undergraduate student at Harvard studying […]

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