Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani
Marco Iansiti is Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He is a co-director of the Laboratory for Information Science at Harvard and of the Digital Initiative at HBS. Marco holds a PhD and an AB in Physics from Harvard. He is an advisor at KeystoneAI.
Karim R. Lakhani is a Business Administration Professor at Harvard Business School. He is co-director of the Laboratory of Innovation Science at Harvard’s Institute of Quantitative Social Science. He is Chair of the Harvard Business School’s Analytics Program. Karim holds bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University, a masters degree in Technology and Policy from MIT and a PhD in management from the MIT. He previously served as a Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management.
This is certainly one of the better books addressing AI and business innovation. A must read for any organization now confronting AI challenges regardless of their respective markets. In industry after industry, the core elements of data, analytics, and AI-driven processes have certainly transformed business.
Is your strategy AI first? It should be
Many are unaware of how quickly this AI shift occurred and now confront challenges to their long held business strategies. Marco and Karim document how we have entered a new era. AI is now challenging the very concept of business markets. How can Airbnb challenge Marriott? On the surface Marriott’s 100 year business seems invincible yet Airbnb can book rooms at three times the size of all Marriott properties including their recent acquisition of Starwood Hotels in 2016.
Perhaps the biggest change is that organizations who transform to become AI focused will rewrite their strategic plans and now operate under a new AI mindset that redefines how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.
Leaders must understand today’s post covid business
Chapter 2: Rethinking the Firm takes a deep look at how companies must pivot not to compete but to survive. The key lesson is Putting AI at the Core, as Google strategically shifted from mobile to ‘AI first’ during their 2017 I/O conference. A section called Building and Running the AI Factory is addressing Netflix’s rise based upon their AI first strategy.
Yet perhaps the most powerful story is within Chapter 5: Becoming an AI Company. This deep look at Microsoft’s transformation from a server and tools company into an ‘AI first’ company via Azure is very revealing. It can be easily mimic’d at your organization. I was also impressed by their reference to the work of Albert Laszio Barabasi.
From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, Marco and Karim’s research shows how AI-driven processes are much more scalable than traditional business processes. This is resulting in new powerful opportunities for learning that AI will deliver results including more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions.
In conclusion, this book is a breakthrough for organizational leaders to understand why adopting an ‘AI first’ model is necessary today. Or you can watch from the sidelines as your organization loses marketshare, people, and revenue. It’s your choice.