+ THREE INSIGHTS FOR THE WEEK |
1. It’s hard work shaping a strategy for artificial intelligence in 2025. Business leaders must tackle everything from risk management to AI ethics, with data management and culture challenges thrown in.
To guide those decisions, MIT Sloan Management Review curated a collection of recent articles that offer 10 timely takeaways for AI leaders. Among the advice:
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Learn how to manage tech debt in the AI era. Companies that are well positioned for change maintain a reinvention-ready “digital core” — a set of key components such as cloud infrastructure, data, and AI that can be easily updated.
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Use generative AI to turbocharge how your organization learns. Done right, this can create a positive compounding effect on organizational learning, with human and machine agents working in concert to create new competitive advantages.
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Pay more attention to generative AI app evaluation. A metrics-based evaluation process implemented over the course of the app development cycle strongly increases the likelihood of building applications that deliver organizational value.
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2. Imagine a world without radar to help the Allied forces achieve victory in World War II, or one without ethernet, email, or maybe even the internet itself.
What if there were no photolithography, a technique that has enabled the fabrication of every chip and every laptop, smartphone, military system, and data center over the past 20 years? Imagine a world without GPS or standard methods for air traffic control, or where cybersecurity were a lot less secure.
A new three-minute video invites viewers to consider MIT’s achievements in solving real-world problems and showcases ongoing advances in quantum computing, AI, and national security. Can you spot the cheetah robot?
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3. Corporate boards that are savvy about artificial intelligence are helping some companies outperform others.
That’s according to a new research briefing from the MIT Center for Information Systems Research, which found that companies must now be both digitally savvy and AI savvy to compete in today’s dynamic environment.
In analyzing 2,788 publicly traded U.S. companies with more than $1 billion in revenues in 2024, the researchers determined that 26% of company boards were both digitally and AI savvy, and those companies were outperforming their peers.
Companies with both digitally and AI-savvy boards saw an average return on equity that was 10.9 percentage points above the industry average, compared with the 74% of companies with nonsavvy boards, which averaged 3.8 percentage points below their industry average.
The CISR researchers analyzed board committees — a subset of directors who focus on certain topics and advise the board on them. They found that digitally and AI-savvy boards were more statistically likely to have committees focused on cybersecurity, talent, and technology and digital products.
“Since 2019, the technology innovation curve has steepened, with large organizations leveraging new digital technologies such as generative and agentic AI, robotics, and xTech technologies,” the researchers write.
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Get ready for hybrid intelligence systems
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A new book looks at how the integration of artificial and human intelligence will impact individuals, organizations, and society.
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In “SuperShifts: Transforming How We Live, Learn, and Work in the Age of Intelligence,” Ja-Naé Duane and Steve Fisher look at how emerging technologies create opportunities for transformation and even signal the development of new intelligent species.
Among these transformations is “IntelliFusion,” which the authors define as “the convergence and seamless integration of artificial intelligence with human intelligence, blurring the boundaries between machine and human cognition.”
Duane, a behavioral scientist, is an academic research fellow at the MIT Center for Information Systems Research. Fisher is an entrepreneur and futurist.
Individuals will have to develop new skills to work alongside these intelligent systems and effectively leverage their capabilities, they write. But the rewards could be significant.
“AI assistants could help us manage our time more efficiently, enhance our decision-making with data-driven insights, and even augment our memory and recall abilities,” the authors write.
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