Creating alignment and actionable results — The barriers to organizational transformation Confidence, accuracy, and speed in making decisions are the holy grail for organizational transformation. With all the work taking place in decision science, AI, and data science, we still find ourselves weary from long meetings seeking the collective confidence to know we are making the right decision. …

Toward a generative collective intelligence — Predicting the likelihood of success of products, programs, and policies Market intelligence aims to learn what people want — to find what resonates with an audience, leading to spontaneous adoption. Excellent market intelligence predicts a population’s future preferences, needs, and behaviors in response to a product, public policy, or marketing program. But despite massive data and sophisticated predictive analytics, overall…

Integrating natural and artificial intelligence — Presented to the Boston Global Forum High-level Conference “AI Assistant Regulation Summit: Fostering a Tech Enlightenment Economy Alliance” at the Harvard Faculty Club. The paper presented here is an expansion of that talk. We are at many crossroads. The one in sharp view in recent months is AI, resulting in…

A new generation of AI serving human creativity Tensions are opportunities that need creative solutions. Great entrepreneurs hone their skills at turning observations of points of tension into new business opportunities. For example, Amazon recognized early on the tension of waiting for products to arrive while paying high shipping fees…

A new AI-enabled calculus of collaboration Getting to conclusions and actions The pandemic caused a sea change in how we work together. The need for practical, outcome-driven collaboration is front and center as we look to the future of work. But collaboration is complex, and there’s a powerful reason. As the number of participants increases…

The capacity of groups to solve problems rests on finding common ground. At the moment, our nation and our world struggle. It is a struggle between building and preserving identity (be it national, political party, corporate, or individual) and the capacity to form bridges of understanding and knowledge discovery. Managing…

Collective reasoning at work This past week a McKinsey article titled "Bias Busters, A better way to brainstorm" gave supporting stories for what promises to be a way to get us out of our silos and take a fresh approach to tackle our most challenging problems. In it, authors Renaldo…

The concept of AI technology that enhances our daily lives is not new. We have reaped the benefits of AI, starting with early successes in fraud detection to recent advances in interacting with machines in natural language. The pattern is clear, expanding the frontier of automation afforded by AI leads…

What we can learn from the failure of iBuyer — Zillow made a big bet on AI and lost. Zillow’s AI loss reported a few weeks ago shines a light on the danger of putting trust in an autonomous, black-box algorithm based on making predictions from data. Thousands lost their jobs, and the financial loss exceeded half a billion dollars…