Automation Archives - Don Kasprzak

Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work by Ravin Jesuthasan and John Boudreau.

Reinventing Jobs: A 4-Step Approach for Applying Automation to Work by Ravin Jesuthasan, and John W. Boudreau

John Boudreau is Professor Emeritus of Management and Organization and a Senior Research Scientist with the Center for Effective Organizations at the University of Southern California. He holds a Masters and PhD from Purdue University in Industrial Administration.

Ravin is Senior Partner and Global Leader for Transformation Services at Mercer. Previously he was a Managing Director at Willis Towers Watson. He holds an MBA from Western Michigan University and is a Part-time Lecturer at Caltech’s Executive Education Program.

So, the drumbeats of AI have certainly peaked within 2023. Today ChatGPT is just 13 months old. And while the company is showing its age the impact upon society and business is now at a crossroads.

Accordingly for all the hype of Generative AI, organizations simply do not know how to deploy AI solutions. There are failed AI deployments within 2023. While much of the attention has certainly been to the lack of security and privacy within ChatGPT, the most important aspect for any organizations is confronting AI’s digital disruption including the impact upon employees.

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.