Artificial Intelligence: The Insights You Need from Harvard Business Review
Various Contributors
Harvard Business Review Press (September 2019)

How and why companies that don’t use AI will soon become obsolete

This is one of the first volumes in a new series published by Harvard Business Review Press. Each offers dozens of cutting-edge insights within a business field of greatest importance now when the global marketplace today is more volatile, more uncertain, more complex, and more ambiguous than at any prior time that I can recall. In this instance, the field is artificial intelligence.

Each volume anthologizes HBR articles that are among the most relevant and of greatest value. There are twelve in this volume that focus on AI, following a superb Introduction by Thomas Davenport. In terms of value, if all seventeen were purchased separately as reprints, the total cost would be about $110. Amazon now sells a copy of this volume for only $19.95. That’s quite a bargain.

Davenport nails it: “Even as the significance of AI becomes irrefutable, it remains misunderstood. Executives view AI as a key disruptive technology, employees fear it as a job destroyer, consultants pitch it as a cure-all, and the media hype and deride it endlessly.

“This book will help you tune out all this noise and understand AI’s implications for you and your business. No matter your industry, level, or size of the company, this collection of some of HBR‘s best recent articles on AI will show you where the technology is going.”

Here are the key points he discusses in his overview (Pages xii-xv), material that brilliantly creates a context — a frame of reference — for the seventeen articles that follow:

o AI is booming in business — at least in certain segments of it.
o A variety of different AI technologies are in use.
o AI is being applied for various business purposes.
o Many large companies are creating infrastructures and processes to managed AI.
o Companies are finding success by focusing their AI efforts in certain areas of the organization.
o AI hasn’t transformed business — yet.
o AI’s overall impact on employment isn’t certain, but jobs will clearly change.
o Implementing AI raises ethical questions.

For me, one of the greatest benefits of this new series is that each volume illustrates what Wayne Gretsky meant when asked to explain why he played hockey better than almost all of his opponents: “They knew where the puck was.  I knew where it was going to be.”

The information, insights, and counsel in this volume — and in the other series volumes I have read thus far — will help business leaders to see where their competitive market will be in months and even years to come.

Here are two points of my own. First, there are no AI issues. Rather, ultimately, there are only business issues. Also, it is very important to think in terms of enterprise architecture as your organization’s primary strategy when embracing and then acting upon the insights it needs to prosper.