Workers spend a lot of time toggling between apps and websites to do their jobs. But how often do they really do this, and how much times does it really take up? The authors studied 20 teams, totaling 137 users, across three Fortune 500 companies for up to five weeks. They found workers toggled roughly 1,200 times each day, which adds up to just under four hours each week reorienting themselves after toggling — roughly 9% of their time at work. While many companies may write this off as the...| Harvard Business Review
To successfully integrate generative AI (gen AI) in marketing, companies need to balance automation, customization, and human oversight. As such, they should follow a few steps. First, determine whether a task requires gen AI for content creation or analytical AI for data-driven predictions—often, a combination of both is ideal. Next, assess whether to rely on general AI models or invest in proprietary training data to enhance accuracy and reduce risks. Finally, establish the appropriate le...| Harvard Business Review
As AI becomes more powerful, it faces a major trust problem. Consider 12 leading concerns: disinformation, safety and security, the black box problem, ethical concerns, bias, instability, hallucinations in LLMs, unknown unknowns, potential job losses and social inequalities, environmental impact, industry concentration, and state overreach. Each of these issues is complex — and not easy to solve. But there is one consistent approach to addressing the trust gap: training, empowering, and inc...| Harvard Business Review
Is your team making good use of tools like Slack, Zoom, and Trello?| Harvard Business Review
Last year, HBR published a piece on how people are using gen AI. Much has happened over the past 12 months. We now have Custom GPTs—AI tailored for narrower sets of requirements. New kids are on the block, such as DeepSeek and Grok, providing more competition and choice. Millions of ears pricked up as Google debuted their podcast generator, NotebookLM. OpenAI launched many new models (now along with the promise to consolidate them all into one unified interface). Chain-of-thought reasonin...| Harvard Business Review
Karim Lakhani is a professor at Harvard Business School who specializes in workplace technology and particularly AI. He’s done pioneering work in identifying how digital transformation has remade the world of business, and he’s the co-author of the 2020 book Competing in the Age of AI . Customers will expect AI-enhanced experiences with companies, he says, so business leaders must experiment, create sandboxes, run internal bootcamps, and develop AI use cases not just for technology worker...| Harvard Business Review
The year end is a busy time for almost everyone. As we use our smartphones to confirm online gift orders, we’re also trying to wrap up those work tasks we should have finished in November. We feel overwhelmed but also productive, pleased with our ability to juggle so many things. In reality, however, that sort […]| Harvard Business Review
Cognitive technologies are increasingly being used to solve business problems; indeed, many executives believe that AI will substantially transform their companies within three years. But many of the most ambitious AI projects encounter setbacks or fail. A survey of 250 executives familiar with their companies’ use of cognitive technology and a study of 152 projects show that companies do better by taking an incremental rather than a transformative approach to developing and implementing AI...| Harvard Business Review
Digital innovation spurred by Covid-19 has put AI and analytics at the center of business operations. AI and analytics are boosting productivity, delivering new products and services, accentuating corporate values, addressing supply chain issues, and fueling new startups. In this article, we address lessons learned from the pandemic and how they can be applied to spurring new economic opportunity.| Harvard Business Review
Generative AI models for businesses threaten to upend the world of content creation, with substantial impacts on marketing, software, design, entertainment, and interpersonal communications. These models are able to produce text and images: blog posts, program code, poetry, and artwork. The software uses complex machine learning models to predict the next word based on previous word sequences, or the next image based on words describing previous images. Companies need to understand how these ...| Harvard Business Review
While 89% of large companies globally have a digital and AI transformation underway, they have only captured 31% of the expected revenue lift and 25% of expected cost savings from the effort. Until business leaders are convinced of the value and confident in how to get it, they are unlikely to do the difficult, hands-in-the-dirt changes needed to improve their success rate. To see where digital transformation creates value, the authors used McKinsey’s Finalta benchmark, which tracked the pe...| Harvard Business Review
Generative AI, which uses data lakes and question snippets to recover patterns and relationships, is becoming more prevalent in creative industries. However, the legal implications of using generative AI are still unclear, particularly in relation to copyright infringement, ownership of AI-generated works, and unlicensed content in training data. Courts are currently trying to establish how intellectual property laws should be applied to generative AI, and several cases have already been file...| Harvard Business Review
Despite a decade or more of restructuring and downsizing, many U.S. companies are still unprepared to operate in the 1990s. In a time of rapidly changing technologies and ever-shorter product life cycles, product development often proceeds at a glacial pace. In an age of the customer, order fulfillment has high error rates and customer inquiries […]| Harvard Business Review
Automation is coming.| Harvard Business Review