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HBS AI Content & Learning

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Is AI Making Your Team Lazy?

Exploring the hidden cost of human disengagement from AI Listen to this article: We are rapidly entering an AI era defined by the “agentic” shift. These tools now write code, manage inboxes, conduct research, and execute multi-step workflows without a human lifting a finger. But when AI does more, what happens to the humans at […]

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The Hidden Economics of Workplace AI

As AI learns directly from how people work, a new tension is emerging about expertise, power, and governance. Listen to this article: In many workplaces, the newest addition to virtual meetings isn’t a colleague, but an AI assistant like Granola or Otter. Suddenly no one has to scramble for action items or wonder who said […]

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Back to the Beginnings of AI at Work

What a Landmark AI Study Tells Us About When to Trust, and When Not to Trust, AI Listen to this article: In September 2023, a working paper out of Harvard Business School landed at an unusually consequential moment. Generative AI had been publicly available for less than a year, organizations were scrambling to understand its […]

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Everyone Has AI. Which Firms are Going to Win?

New research shows that access to AI is not the same as knowing where to use it. Listen to this article: A firm is only as fast as the slowest step in its chain of work. In manufacturing, it might be one particular machine on the line. In software, one overloaded intake service. Many business […]

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The Surprising Link Between AI Reasoning and Honesty

Exploring how the complexity of large language models acts as a moral safeguard Listen to this article: The standard fear about advanced AI goes something like this: the more sophisticated a system becomes, the better it gets at sounding convincing, reading the room, and manipulating people. A model that can reason step-by-step might not just […]

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Why Your AI Strategy May Be Failing

How companies can overcome the structural frictions that block AI at scale Listen to this article: AI has entered the enterprise faster than most previous waves of technology, reshaping expectations about speed, productivity, and decision-making. Yet adoption alone does not produce transformation. The Frontier Firm Initiative (FFI), a joint effort between the Harvard Business School […]

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Competing in the Dark

New research reveals that firms are playing a game of catch-up they didn’t even know they were losing Listen to this article: Leaders know they must innovate to survive, and they don’t make decisions in a vacuum: they watch rivals, draw inferences, and position themselves accordingly. But what happens when their picture of the competitive […]

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The AI Deep Research Race Has a New Leaderboard

A new cross-domain benchmark reveals how the leading AI research tools perform on real-world production tasks Listen to this article: Two AI-generated research reports land on your desk before a major decision. Both are polished, confidently written, and well-structured, but they reach different conclusions. Which one do you trust, and how would you even begin […]

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The Manager’s AI Dilemma

How to design AI adoption so decision makers can say yes without self-sabotage Lots of organizations can green-light AI. Far fewer can absorb it. That gap, between excitement and real, embedded use, keeps showing up even when ROI is compelling and leadership is visibly supportive. New research from Harvard Business School AI Institute Frontier Firm […]

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The Fast-Talking AI Chat Agent

New research shows when AI boosts service, and when it backfires. Think about the last time you contacted customer support. Did you start with a chatbot? If it failed to resolve your problem, how did you feel when transferred to a human agent? This dynamic defines our expectations of the modern customer service experience: the […]

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