• January–February 2025
• Article

For years, online experimentation has fueled the innovations of leading tech companies, enabling them to rapidly test and refine new ideas, optimize product features, personalize user experiences, and maintain a competitive edge. The widespread availability and lower cost of experimentation tools today mean that most organizations—even outside the technology sector—conduct tests. After initial adoption, however, many of them restrict experimentation to just a handful of carefully selected projects. That’s because their data scientists are the only ones who can design, run, and analyze tests. Vastly increasing the capacity to conduct online experiments is becoming more critical as the expanding capabilities and applications of artificial intelligence—particularly generative AI—reshape innovation. Scaling up experimentation entails moving away from a data-scientist-centric approach to one that empowers everyone else on the product, marketing, and sales teams to run experiments. The authors suggest how to do that.

• December 18, 2024
• Article

While AI has the potential to solve major problems, organizations embarking on such journeys of often encounter obstacles. They include a dearth of high-quality data; too many possible solutions; the lack of a clear, measurable objective; and difficulty in identifying whether a proposed solutions is “good.” In tackling these issues, Google DeepMind, Alphabet’s AI lab that is striving to solve extremely challenging real-world problems, has come up with solutions that can benefit others. And it also offers guidance in choosing which opportunities to pursue after potential projects have overcome those hurdles.

• December 2024
• Case

Launched in 2017, Enerjisa Üretim was one of Türkiye’s largest private sector electricity companies. In its early days, the company faced some financial and operational troubles. When İhsan Erbil Bayçöl, the current CEO of Enerjisa Üretim, joined the business in 2018, he implemented a series of initiatives to improve the company’s performance. He expanded its portfolio of renewable energy by developing multiple wind power plants across Türkiye. While this project aligned with the company’s growth and sustainability goals, it required significant investment in infrastructure and workforce expansion. Additionally, Bayçöl led the creation of the Senkron Remote Operation Center, a unit in the company’s headquarters whose function was to remotely operate and monitor power plants using advanced technologies. In 2022, the company achieved a major milestone by converting one of its hydroelectric facilities into Türkiye’s first “dark power plant” (i.e., a plant running without human intervention). Bayçöl knew that it would be complex to replicate the same model across all the different types of power plants scattered across the country. Building on the company’s expertise, Bayçöl led a collaboration with Microsoft in 2023 to enable Enerjisa Üretim to sell its digital offerings to third-party firms via the tech giant’s platforms. The partnership was expected to enlarge Enerjisa Üretim’s client base, so Bayçöl had to ensure the workforce was capable enough to cater for the growing demand. As Bayçöl was planning the future of Enerjisa Üretim, he wondered which business line he should give the most attention to and what priorities to focus on within each of the business lines.