Leaders: AI Adoption is Up to You - Future Proof with AI

A new survey of tech founders finds that adoption hides a much bigger story about who is willing to restructure work around AI

AI will not reorganize your company for you. With increased automation and agentic AI systems inching into the workplace, leaders have a vital role to play in producing AI transformation in their orgs. The new working paper “Delegating to AI: Beliefs and the Organization of Work at New Ventures,” co-written by HBS AI Institute PI Rembrand Koning, explores this issue with a population that should be AI’s likeliest winners: founders of young, growth-oriented North American tech startups. If AI re-organizes work anywhere, it should happen here. Yet the benefits Koning and his co-author found vary dramatically, suggesting that the value of AI is not determined by adoption alone. It depends on how leaders and managers redesign workflows, make delegation decisions, and decide where human-AI collaboration happens.

Why This Matters

For business leaders and executives, the new transformation goal is to decide and actually integrate AI into your organization. This means deliberately mapping it into production, using it across functions, and treating human-AI collaboration as an organizational capability. Without doing so, the gap between yourself and lean, tech-savvy startups is only poised to grow larger.

Thank you for listening. You can find links to the insight article and the research paper in the description. The text-version of the Insight article includes citations and a ‘Meet the Authors’ section with information about the research team.

Link to the HBS AI Institute Insight Article

Link to the Research Paper