Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review by Thomas H. Davenport, Erik Brynjolfsson, Andrew McAfee, and H. James Wilson. This HBR series is certainly a very good collection of essays from leading AI experts.
Thomas H. Davenport is a Distinguished Professor in Management and Information Technology at Babson College, a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and a senior adviser at Deloitte Analytics. Erik Brynjolfsson is the director of MIT’s Initiative on the Digital Economy, Professor of Management Science at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and a research associate at NBER. H. James Wilson is a managing director of information technology and business research at Accenture Research. Andrew McAfee is a principal research scientist at MIT, studies how digital technologies are changing business, the economy, and society.
Indeed, this is not a general introduction to AI for business. At the same time, this does present readers with business advantages and challenges. There is no coding and the book is not full of technical jargon.
The messaging across this book is direct and startling for some: if your organization is not using AI you will soon be obsolete. This should not be a surprise since AI was ‘born’ in 1956. Yes, the last decade’s computing performance both on-prem and in the cloud have pushed AI further into markets. Yet the competitive lessons are valuable.
There is great insights for beginning an AI initiative at your organization:
Chapter 1: The State of AI in Business
Tom Davenport provides the AI landscape for business in an easy narrative. Perhaps his key is explaining what AI is and what it is not for business. No hype here needed as he provides insights that is valuable across all business markets.
Chapter 2: Inside Facebook’s AI Workshop
The timing certainly seems perfect regarding the new Meta name, as the chapter is all things Facebook AI. Joaquin explains how he began introducing AI across Facebook’s business models. While the book’s focus is on business, this chapter does not mention Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica scandal nor the use of AI in the Trump 2016 campaign. As a result, Joaquin departed and is now at Microsoft Research. Moreover, he took the blame for Facebook’s misinformation in an MIT article entitled “Artificial Intelligence: How Facebook got addicted to spreading misinformation” The company’s AI algorithms gave it an insatiable habit for lies and hate speech. Now the man who built them can’t fix the problem.
Chapter 7: What will happen when your company’s algorithms go wrong?
Perhaps the most insightful chapter for me to appreciate. There are a wealth of examples when business failed to understand their core service and an AI system just made a bad decision even worse.
Chapter 8: How will AI change work? Here Are Five Schools of Thought
These ideas are addressing collaboration between humans and AI systems. The five areas of focus: flexibility, speed, scale, decision making and personalization. This chapter also provides three actions shaping the future:
- Use technology to augment human skills and reinvent operating models
- Take the opportunity to redefine jobs and rethink organizational design
- Make employees your partners in building the intelligent enterprise
Honestly HBR could right a book about AI in the US Presidential Elections from 2012 forward and probably deliver a solid understanding of how AI is tipping the scales at the voter booth. I have read Tom Davenport’s books Competing on Analytics, Big Data at Work, Keeping up with the Quants, and of course The AI Advantage.
In conclusion, this was a quick, enjoyable read made possible by noted authors. I would highly recommend this book for any organization’s leadership to digest to understand at the 10,000 foot level the power of AI.