Publications

May 2022
Supplement

Borusan CAT: Monetizing Prediction in the Age of AI (B)

By: Navid Mojir and Gamze Yucaoglu

Borusan Cat is an international distributor of Caterpillar heavy machines. In 2021, it had been three years since Ozgur Gunaydin (CEO) and Esra Durgun (Director of Strategy, Digitization, and Innovation) started working on Muneccim, the company’s predictive AI tool.... View Details

Keywords: AI and Machine Learning; Commercialization; Technology Adoption; Industrial Products Industry; Turkey; Middle East

15 Nov 2018
News

Don’t Be Afraid of AI

Dubinsky: And we get example after example, I just used that one 'cause it's so visual, of ways in which there are things we cannot do today, or it's very dangerous for humans today, that if we had a machine... View Details

Keywords: Computer Systems Design and Related Services; Computer Systems Design and Related Services

Teaching AI to Handle Exceptions: Supervised Fine-Tuning with Human-Aligned Judgment

Large language models (LLMs), initially developed for generative AI, are now evolving into agentic AI systems, which make decisions in complex, real-world contexts. Unfortunately, while their generative capabilities are well-documented, their decision-making... View Details

December 2023 (Revised August 2024)
Case

Monsters in the Machine? Tackling the Challenge of Responsible AI

By: Paul M. Healy and Debora L. Spar

In November of 2022, the small tech company OpenAI released ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot which quickly captured the public’s imagination—becoming the world’s fastest-growing consumer application within months of its release. Though observers from across... View Details

Keywords: Technological Innovation; AI and Machine Learning; Ethics; Governing Rules, Regulations, and Reforms; Technology Adoption; Corporate Social Responsibility and Impact; Technology Industry; United States; European Union; China

11 Apr 2023
Research & Ideas

Is Amazon a Retailer, a Tech Firm, or a Media Company? How AI Can Help Investors Decide

industry lines as companies increasingly bring seemingly unrelated business lines together in unconventional ways. New research by Awada, Harvard Business School Professor Suraj Srinivasan, and doctoral student Paul J. Hamilton harnesses... View Details

Keywords: by Danielle Kost; Consumer Products; Real Estate; Financial Services; Retail

September 2020 (Revised March 2022)
Case

JOANN: Joannalytics Inventory Allocation Tool

By: Kris Ferreira and Srikanth Jagabathula

Michael Joyce, Vice President of Inventory Management at JOANN, championed an effort to develop and implement an inventory allocation analytics tool that used advanced analytics to predict in-season demand of seasonal items for each of JOANN’s nearly 900 stores and... View Details

Keywords: Analytics; Machine Learning; Optimization; Inventory Management; Mathematical Methods; Decision Making; Operations; Supply Chain Management; Resource Allocation; Distribution; Technology Adoption; Applications and Software; Change Management; Fashion Industry; Consumer Products Industry; Retail Industry; United States; Ohio

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

November 2024 (Revised April 2025)
Case

Cheerful Music

By: Shunyuan Zhang, Feng Zhu and Nancy Hua Dai

Established by Snow Jiang in 2019 in Shenzhen, China, Cheerful Music was a record label company that had created many hit songs in China. “Yi Xiao Jiang Hu,” its most famous hit song, gained billions of views on social media platforms in China and overseas as the... View Details

Keywords: Generative Ai; Music Entertainment; Global Strategy; Business Model; AI and Machine Learning; Market Entry and Exit; Music Industry; China; United Kingdom; London

01 Jun 2024
News

Competing in the Age of AI

Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration. He views AI in the same way—a widely available invention that enables people to go farther and faster,... View Details

Keywords: April White

January 2018 (Revised February 2023)
Teaching Note

The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO

By: Prithwiraj Choudhury

This teaching note pairs with the case entitled: “The Future of Patent Examination at the USPTO” (case no. 617-027). View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Telework; Collaborating With Unions; Recruitment; Intellectual Property; Copyright; Patents; Trademarks; Knowledge Sharing; Technology Adoption; District of Columbia

Web

Online AI Course | HBS Online

and why it’s vital to accelerate your AI journey now. Highlights Bratin Saha, Vice President and General Manager of Machine View Details

January 2025
Case

Hebbia: Redefining Productivity for Knowledge Workers Using AI

By: Suraj Srinivasan and Minoshka Narayan

In early 2025, George Sivulka, founder and CEO of Hebbia, reflected on the company’s rapid ascent as a pioneer in GenAI-powered productivity tools for knowledge workers. With its proprietary technology, Hebbia had redefined information retrieval and analysis and earned... View Details

Keywords: Transformation; Customer Relationship Management; AI and Machine Learning; Innovation and Management; Innovation Strategy; Service Delivery; Technological Innovation; Growth and Development Strategy; Competitive Strategy; Banking Industry; Financial Services Industry; Technology Industry; United States; New York (city, NY)

07 Mar 2023
HBS Case

ChatGPT: Did Big Tech Set Up the World for an AI Bias Disaster?

company, Google CEO Sundar Pichai issued an apology. Learning from Google’s mistakes The takeaways from Gebru’s story are hardly singular to Google as Big Tech scrambles to build ever-larger AI data sets... View Details

Keywords: by Scott Van Voorhis; Technology

April 2024
Case

Managing AI Risks in Consumer Banking

By: Suraj Srinivasan, Satish Tadikonda, Paul Dongha, Manoj Saxena and Radhika Kak

In early 2024, Ruth Jones, head of digital banking at Signa Bank, a (fictitious) European consumer bank, was thinking about how to best incorporate GenAI capabilities to improve efficiencies and create new ways to improve the customer experience. Where were the biggest... View Details

Keywords: Customer Relationship Management; AI and Machine Learning; Risk Management; Opportunities; Customization and Personalization; Banking Industry; Europe

2020
Article

Public Sentiment and the Price of Corporate Sustainability

By: George Serafeim

Combining corporate sustainability performance scores based on environmental, social, and governance (ESG) data with big data measuring public sentiment about a company’s sustainability performance, I find that the valuation premium paid for companies with strong... View Details

Keywords: Sustainability; ESG; ESG (Environmental, Social, Governance) Performance; Investment Management; Investment Strategy; Big Data; Machine Learning; Environment; Environmental Sustainability; Corporate Governance; Performance; Asset Pricing; Investment; Management; Strategy; Human Capital; Public Opinion; Value; Analytics and Data Science

SSRN

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February 2018
Article

Retention Futility: Targeting High-Risk Customers Might Be Ineffective.

By: Eva Ascarza

Companies in a variety of sectors are increasingly managing customer churn proactively, generally by detecting customers at the highest risk of churning and targeting retention efforts towards them. While there is a vast literature on developing churn prediction models... View Details

Keywords: Retention/churn; Proactive Churn Management; Field Experiments; Heterogeneous Treatment Effect; Machine Learning; Customer Relationship Management; Risk Management

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Article

Algorithms Need Managers, Too

By: Michael Luca, Jon Kleinberg and Sendhil Mullainathan

Algorithms are powerful predictive tools, but they can run amok when not applied properly. Consider what often happens with social media sites. Today many use algorithms to decide which ads and links to show users. But when these algorithms focus too narrowly on... View Details

Keywords: Machine Learning; Algorithms; Predictive Analytics; Management; Big Data; Analytics and Data Science

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27 Jun 2024
Research & Ideas

Gen AI Marketing: How Some 'Gibberish' Code Can Give Products an Edge

their products listed on top, is that a good thing or a bad thing? It just depends on which side you’re looking from,” says Lakkaraju. The coffee machine experiment The study involves a hypothetical search for an “affordable” new coffee... View Details

Keywords: by Ben Rand; Technology

2021
Working Paper

Invisible Primes: Fintech Lending with Alternative Data

By: Marco Di Maggio, Dimuthu Ratnadiwakara and Don Carmichael

We exploit anonymized administrative data provided by a major fintech platform to investigate whether using alternative data to assess borrowers’ creditworthiness results in broader credit access. Comparing actual outcomes of the fintech platform’s model to... View Details

Keywords: Fintech Lending; Alternative Data; Machine Learning; Algorithm Bias; Finance; Information Technology; Financing and Loans; Analytics and Data Science; Credit