Articles

4 Steps to Transform the "Middle Office" with AI

Companies are spending heavily on AI, but many are still struggling to turn that investment into measurable business results. One reason is that they're overlooking the middle office, where work such...

How to Respond to the Coming AI Cost Shock

Today's AI adoption has been fueled by heavily subsidized pricing from enterprise software vendors, but that era is ending. Companies are shifting toward usage-based charges. As organizations replace...

AI Makes Building Easy. Choosing What to Build Is Harder.

AI is making it possible for individuals with little technical expertise to build sophisticated products, raising questions about whether collaboration is becoming less important. Observations from...

Algorithmic Shopping Is Here. Is Your Company Ready?

Executives have spent years preparing their organizations to use AI internally. The next challenge is preparing for AI as the customer. As intelligent shopping agents increasingly evaluate, compare,...

How Much Time Do Your Employees Spend Botsitting?

AI promises to reduce workloads and improve organizational performance, but its benefits often come with a hidden cost: “botsitting,” the work employees do to make AI useful, from supplying context...

Don't Let AI Flatten Your Leadership Style

As leaders increasingly rely on AI, they risk delegating not just tasks but the judgment, voice, and presence that define effective leadership. Protecting their agency requires being intentional...

AI and IT Teams Often Clash. But They Don't Have To.

The arrival of AI has exposed a growing organizational fault line. Although AI and IT are often grouped together as echnology,they typically operate with very different priorities: IT emphasizes...

Research: How AI Agents Broaden the Scope of Knowledge Work

AI agents don’t just speed up knowledge work; they change its nature. In a field study of Perplexity’s conversational assistant and autonomous agent, researchers found that not only did the agent...

Don't Let AI Make Bad Analytics Worse

AI is making data analysis faster and more accessible, but it can also amplify flawed reasoning by producing more answers to the wrong questions. Organizations can avoid that trap by building...

Research: Why Some Junior Employees Work Well with AI-and Others Don't

Organizations need to understand how individuals create value beyond the AI baseline in real organizational settings, particularly in higher-stakes professional work requiring judgment, domain...

AI Is Changing How Customers Choose Your Business

As AI increasingly mediates how customers research, evaluate, and choose suppliers, competitive advantage is shifting from direct customer understanding to managing AI-shaped interactions. Drawing on...

Responsible AI Is Becoming a Growth Strategy

As artificial intelligence becomes embedded in products, services, and decision making, trust is emerging as a critical competitive advantage. Corporate Digital Responsibility (CDR) must evolve from...

Design AI Systems That Actually Strengthen Human Reasoning

Research from management, cognitive science, and human-computer interaction indicates that users often accept AI-generated outputs uncritically, leading to cognitive offloading, the erosion of...

U.S. and Japanese Companies Struggle with Different Parts of AI Adoption-and Offer Different Lessons for Making It Work

Companies in both the U.S. and Japan are struggling to deploy AI, but often in very different ways. In the U.S., deployment is wide but shallow, meaning companies struggle to create real value with...

When Developing an AI Strategy, Beware the Urgency Trap

There’s a consistent pattern in failed or underperforming AI initiatives. Business leaders tend to frame AI through the lens of what they see as the most urgent problems—bottlenecks in productivity,...

Your Talent Strategy Has to Keep Up with Your AI Transformation

The entry-level job pipeline is thinning globally, and the consequences of eliminating these types of roles in favor of AI are compounding. Eliminate entry-level roles, and you reduce the headcount...

How to Get AI to Surface Your Brand

As AI increasingly mediates product discovery, traditional brand-building advantages such as awareness, storytelling, and emotional appeal are becoming less decisive. Instead, brands gain visibility...

Teach Your AI How You Make Decisions

As AI agents take on more complex work, the key constraint is no longer access to technology but an organization’s ability to make its decision-making processes explicit. Many critical...

Does Your AI Have a Personality Problem?

As companies embed AI more deeply into work, performance depends not only on what systems can do but how they behave. Research shows that AI personas—supportive or hostile—shape employee stress,...

How to Design Agentic Systems Around the Implicit Rules that Govern Your Company

As companies rush to deploy AI agents, they are discovering that much of their most important organizational intelligence lives outside formal systems and documented processes. Examples from...

Don't Let AI Slop Muck Up Your Company's Processes

Generative AI’s gifts come with a hidden danger: decay in the accuracy and quality of organizational knowledge. This decay is the organization-level version of the “workslop” problem. When workslop...

The Pros and Cons of Continually Assessing Performance

As AI rapidly changes the division of labor between people and machines, organizations need ways of understanding employee capabilities that are more dynamic than just job titles, résumés, and...

To Thrive Alongside AI, Focus on Mindset-Not Skillset

“What’s the 10% of my job that I should focus on, that the AI will never be able to do to maintain a competitive edge?” In a period of sweeping change, it’s a reasonable question to ask. But think...

How Do You Market to an AI Customer?

Commerce as we know it is changing. At the center of that change is the fact that brands have a new type of customer: AI agents. And marketers know very little about how to influence them. But as AI...

Why Employees Aren't Transparent About Their AI Usage

As employees increasingly develop valuable AI workflows through private experimentation, many are choosing not to share what they've learned-not mainly because of weak governance or inadequate tools,...

3 Ways to Rethink Your Build-or-Buy Strategy

Companies treat building versus buying solutions as a single strategic choice. But they should first determine what kind of capability they are trying to create. Physical assets, organizational...

New Data on How We're Really Using AI

In this week's The Insider newsletter, managing editor Gretchen Gavett writes on new research about the most common AI use cases in 2026-from "thinkslop" to workplace support. She also unpacks...

Companies Are Using AI for Efficiency. They Should Use It to Grow.

Many companies are making a costly mistake with AI: Theyre using it for efficiency gains while overlooking the far greater value of using it to boost growth. Real-world marketing experiments show how...

Stop Trying to Replicate a Single Star Performer

Research into organizational learning suggests companies often squander the benefits of diverse talent not because of who they hire, but because of how employees learn from one another. Drawing on...

Research: What China's AI Agents Reveal About the Future of Commerce

Agentic commerce represents a shift in how digital transactions happen. Instead of simply helping people find products, AI agents increasingly carry out tasks on their behalf. Users can delegate...

Beware the Agentic Convergence Trap

When companies deploy AI systems trained on the same market data, optimizing similar objectives at machine speed, they risk falling into a "Agentic Convergence Trap": independent systems arrive at...

The Best Manufacturers Build AI with Workers, Not for Them

Manufacturers are pushing ahead with AI, but workers often feel unprepared, uncertain, and distrustful. Research shows a clear gap between executive optimism and frontline experience, driven by...

Big Tech's Looming Capability Crisis

In 2016, Geoffrey Hinton argued that AI would soon replace radiologists, yet demand for radiologists has since surged. The reason, this article argues, is that AI reduced the cost of image analysis...

How People Are Really Using AI in 2026

In the third edition of this study, the authors found that people are adopting generative AI for an ever-widening range of uses. Trends from one year to the next should be understood as shifts in...

Turn Privacy Regulation into a Competitive Advantage

Privacy regulation often looks like a value destroyer at first. Stock prices dip, compliance costs rise, and leaders brace for disruption. But evidence across countries and industries suggests a more...

What Are Your Company's AI Nightmares?

The standard approach to responsible AI is fundamentally broken. In the age of generative AI, it's too slow, too vague, and too hard to communicate. Instead of focusing on values and policy,...

3 Ways AI Can Free Organizations from Legacy Workflows

Organizations often assume their biggest constraint is a lack of new capabilities. More often, it’s the accumulation of outdated ones. Legacy workflows, entrenched assumptions, and inherited metrics...

The Psychological Costs of Adopting AI

AI adoption strategies are overwhelmingly framed around productivity and efficiency. But that lens misses a critical constraint: the psychological cost of working with AI. New research shows that...

How to Move from AI Experimentation to AI Transformation

Many companies are investing heavily in AI but failing to translate isolated productivity gains into meaningful business results. The problem is a "micro-productivity trap," where firms optimize...

Empathetic Leadership Can Make or Break AI Adoption

Research shows a wide gap between how executives perceive AI adoption and how employees actually experience it-most workers feel anxious and far less enthusiastic than their bosses assume. Without...

The End of One-Size-Fits-All Enterprise Software

Generative AI is dismantling the economic logic that made standardized enterprise software the default, making it fast and feasible for companies to build systems tailored to how they actually work...

When Silos Hinder Innovation-and When They Can Help

Innovation success depends on how a collective is structured, particularly its level of search dependence and goal alignment. Three main types emerge. Convergence-based collectives involve shared...

When Apologizing to Customers Hurts More Than It Helps

Technology now lets firms detect service failures and issue instant apologies at scale. But across five studies, including a large field experiment with a food delivery company, researchers found...

Why Companies That Choose AI Augmentation Over Automation May Win in the Long Run

Leaders are making a choice with their AI strategy: Are they primarily seeking to improve the bottom line through automation and headcount reduction, or grow the top line in innovative ways through...

The Hidden Demand for AI Inside Your Company

Rather than treating employees unauthorized use of consumer AI tools as a compliance problem, companies should recognize it as a signal of untapped demand and redirect that energy into a structured...

Managers and Executives Disagree on AI-and It's Costing Companies

AI initiatives often stall not because leaders lack ambition or investment, but because the people charged with making them work-middle managers-see a very different reality from senior executives...

How Gen AI Robots Are Reshaping Services

By incorporating generative AI, robots are evolving from scripted machines to adaptive systems that interpret context, learn from demonstrations, and adjust their behaviors in real time. Advances in...

To Succeed with AI, You've Got to Nail the Basics

Instead of worrying about whether they're adopting AI fast enough, most companies would be better served by making sure they're getting the basics right. Specifically, they should focus on applying...

Data Privacy Is a Growth Strategy

Protecting customer data is more than a legal or IT obligation. It can be a meaningful driver of business growth. Researchers analyzed 360 real-world company announcements about new or improved...

How AI Helps Scale Qualitative Customer Research

AI-powered interviewers are enabling companies to conduct rich, adaptive conversations with thousands of participants quickly and inexpensively. These systems uncover not just what customers think...

Boards Are Falling Short on Cybersecurity

Despite boards placing greater emphasis on cyber risk, their ability to mitigate it is improving slowly and marginally. There are three prominent factors driving this problem: 1) there's a lack of...