Publications

26 Apr 2023
In Practice

Is AI Coming for Your Job?

will be displaced in large numbers. Those job losses will be partially offset by job gains for machine learning specialists and emerging jobs like prompt engineers. But, once... View Details

Keywords: by Kristen Senz; Technology

October 2023
Teaching Note

Timnit Gebru: 'SILENCED No More' on AI Bias and The Harms of Large Language Models

By: Tsedal Neeley and Tim Englehart

Teaching Note for HBS Case No. 422-085. Dr. Timnit Gebru—a leading artificial intelligence (AI) computer scientist and co-lead of Google’s Ethical AI team—was messaging with one of her colleagues when she saw the words: “Did you resign?? Megan sent an email saying that... View Details

Keywords: Ethics; Employment; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Technological Innovation; AI and Machine Learning; Diversity; Prejudice and Bias; Technology Industry

June 12, 2023
Article

How AI Will Accelerate the Circular Economy

By: Shirley Lu and George Serafeim

Despite living on a planet with finite resources, our economy remains largely linear and full of single-use products. The shift toward a circular economy, where companies recover or recycle resources, has hit roadblocks, including low value of used products and high... View Details

Keywords: Recycling; Materials Management; Innovation and Management; Technological Innovation; Climate Change; Environmental Sustainability; AI and Machine Learning; Operations; Industrial Products Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Technology Industry

Read Now

March 27, 2025
Article

How One Company Used AI to Broaden Its Customer Base

By: Sunil Gupta and Frank V. Cespedes

The software company SAP successfully leveraged AI tools to begin selling to the small and medium enterprises (SMEs) market, which had previously been uneconomical for its in-person sales approach. By mapping the customer journey and deploying over 40 AI tools, SAP... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Sales; Business Strategy; Market Entry and Exit

Read Now

January 2024 (Revised February 2024)
Case

OpenAI: Idealism Meets Capitalism

By: Shikhar Ghosh and Shweta Bagai

In November 2023, the board of OpenAI, one of the most successful companies in the history of technology, decided to fire Sam Altman, its charismatic and influential CEO. Their decision shocked the corporate world and had people wondering why OpenAI had designed a... View Details

Keywords: AI; AI and Machine Learning; Governing and Advisory Boards; Ethics; Strategy; Technological Innovation; Leadership

2020
Book

Work, Mate, Marry, Love: How Machines Shape Our Human Destiny

By: Debora L. Spar

Covering a time frame that ranges from 8000 BC to the present, and drawing upon both Marxist and feminist theories, the book argues that nearly all the decisions we make in our most intimate lives—whom to marry, how to have children, how to have sex, how to think about... View Details

September–October 2021
Article

Frontiers: Can an AI Algorithm Mitigate Racial Economic Inequality? An Analysis in the Context of Airbnb

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Nitin Mehta, Param Singh and Kannan Srinivasan

We study the effect of Airbnb’s smart-pricing algorithm on the racial disparity in the daily revenue earned by Airbnb hosts. Our empirical strategy exploits Airbnb’s introduction of the algorithm and its voluntary adoption by hosts as a quasi-natural experiment. Among... View Details

Keywords: Smart Pricing; Pricing Algorithm; Machine Bias; Discrimination; Racial Disparity; Social Inequality; Airbnb Revenue; Revenue; Race; Equality and Inequality; Prejudice and Bias; Price; Mathematical Methods; Accommodations Industry

SSRN

Find at Harvard

Web

Competing in the Age of AI

Learn about the AI tools at your disposal, and how to deploy them in your organization. Machine learning isn't the... View Details

2021
Working Paper

First Law of Motion: Influencer Video Advertising on TikTok

By: Jeremy Yang, Juanjuan Zhang and Yuhan Zhang

This paper engineers an intuitive feature that is predictive of the causal effect of influencer video advertising on product sales. We propose the concept of m-score, a summary statistic that captures the extent to which a product is advertised in the most engaging... View Details

Keywords: Influencer Advertising; Video Advertising; Computer Vision; Machine Learning; Advertising; Online Technology

SSRN

February 2024 (Revised January 2025)
Case

AGENTS.inc: Pathways to Growth at an AI Startup

By: Frank Nagle, Manuel Hoffmann, Karoline Ströhlein and Susan Pinckney

The case describes the history of AGENTS.inc. Despite being a small startup, with only four employees, that had never had a funding round, the company boasted an impressive client portfolio including multiple Fortune 500 companies. While AGENTS.inc had been an early... View Details

January 2025
Case

Intuition Robotics: An AI Companion for Older Adults

By: Amit Goldenberg, Elie Ofek and Orna Dan

Intuition Robotics, a startup that makes an AI companion robot to alleviate older adults’ loneliness, debates whether to pursue a B2C model or B2G route. If it opts for the government vertical, it must determine how to negotiate a favorable deal. Two weeks after... View Details

Keywords: Business Model; Business Startups; AI and Machine Learning; Technology Adoption; Product Launch; Market Entry and Exit; Negotiation Offer; Business and Government Relations; Health Industry; Technology Industry; United States; New York (state, US)

Blog

Is AI Coming for Your Job?

be displaced in large numbers. Those job losses will be partially offset by job gains for machine learning specialists and emerging jobs like prompt engineers. But, once... View Details

2021
Chapter

Towards a Unified Framework for Fair and Stable Graph Representation Learning

By: Chirag Agarwal, Himabindu Lakkaraju and Marinka Zitnik

As the representations output by Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) are increasingly employed in real-world applications, it becomes important to ensure that these representations are fair and stable. In this work, we establish a key connection between counterfactual... View Details

Keywords: Graph Neural Networks; AI and Machine Learning; Prejudice and Bias

Read Now

20 Oct 2022 - 22 Oct 2022
Talk

Stigma Against AI Companion Applications

By: Julian De Freitas, A. Ragnhildstveit and A.K. Uğuralp

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Attitudes; Perception

18 May 2018
News

From Just Another AI Pilot to Scaled Production: The Missing Links to Convert Ideas to Economic Value for Fortune 500 Companies

January 2025
Technical Note

AI vs Human: Analyzing Acceptable Error Rates Using the Confusion Matrix

By: Tsedal Neeley and Tim Englehart

This technical note introduces the confusion matrix as a foundational tool in artificial intelligence (AI) and large language models (LLMs) for assessing the performance of classification models, focusing on their reliability for decision-making. A confusion matrix... View Details

Keywords: Reliability; Confusion Matrix; AI and Machine Learning; Decision Making; Measurement and Metrics; Performance

September 2024
Exercise

Finding Your 'Jagged Frontier': A Generative AI Exercise

By: Mitchell Weiss

In 2023 a set of scholars set out to study the effect of artificial intelligence (AI) on the quality and productivity of knowledge workers—in this specific instance, management consultants. They wanted to know across a range of tasks in a workflow, which, if any, would... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Performance Productivity; Performance Evaluation; Consulting Industry