Business and management

Prof. Thomas Malone speaks with Poets & Quants for Executives reporter Alison Damast about the executive education course he teaches with Prof. Daniela Rus that aims to provide senior-level managers with a better sense of how AI works. “We are certainly not trying to teach people to understand the details of how to write AI programs, though some of those in the course may know that already,” Malone says. “What we are trying to do is give them a sense of when it is easy and when it is hard to use AI technology at various times for different kinds of business applications.”

Prof. Edward Roberts, one of the area’s “most influential pioneers in entrepreneurship” known for his work “encouraging startups and increasing MIT’s role in the tech industry ecosystem,” has died at 88, reports Aaron Pressman for The Boston Globe. “There’s this narrative that you’re born to be an entrepreneur, and he did this research and debunked that,” explains Prof. Bill Aulet. “It’s impossible to go into entrepreneurship, especially in Boston, but even globally, without finding his influences.”

In an article co-authored for The Economist, Senior Lecturer Donald Sull explores the impact of artificial intelligence and large language models (LLMs) on corporate company culture. “Leaders who do adopt AI for cultural insights can use these to make their employees happier, lower the odds of reputational disasters and, ultimately, boost their profits,” writes Sull. “Measurement is not the only piece of the ‘successful culture’ puzzle, but it is a crucial one. Culture has always been an enigma at the heart of organizational performance: undoubtedly important, but inscrutable. With AI, meaningful progress can be made in deciphering it.”

Writing for Financial Times, economist Ann Harrison spotlights research by Prof. Daron Acemoglu, Pascual Restrepo PhD '16 and Prof. David Autor, that explores the impact of automation on jobs in the United States. Acemoglu and Restrepo have “calculated that each additional robot in the US eliminates 3.3 workers” and that “most of the increase in inequality is due to workers who perform routine tasks being hit by automation,” writes Harrison.

Alicia Chong Rodriguez SM ’17, SM ’18 founded Bloomer Tech, a health tech startup that aims to improve health care diagnostics for women using medical-grade data to develop new therapies and care models, reports Carol Eisenberg for The Washington Post. Rodriguez and her colleagues "developed, patented and tested flexible washable circuits to turn articles of clothing into devices that can relay reams of information to the wearer’s smartphone,” writes Eisenberg.

Prof. Julie Shah speaks with Wall Street Journal reporter Lauren Weber about the implementation of automation in the work force. According to Shah, “when companies adopt automation successfully, they end up adding workers as they become more productive and fill more orders,” writes Weber. “And machines’ lack of flexibility has often resulted in what Shah calls ‘zero-sum automation,’ where gains in productivity are canceled out by the need for people to fix or reprogram robots and compensate for their drawbacks.” 

Prof. Tavneet Suri speaks with NPR reporter Nurith Aizenman about her ongoing research studying the impact of universal basic income with GiveDirectly, a U.S. charity that provides villagers in Kenya with a universal basic income. Suri says her results thus far, “add to the evidence that many poor people are trapped in poverty by a lack of capital for precisely the kinds of transformative investments they would need to vault them into higher incomes.”

Prof. Tavneet Suri speaks with NPR hosts Ari Shapiro and Nurith Aizenman about her research with GiveDirectly a U.S. based charity that provides villages in Kenya with universal basic income. Suri’s work studies how the method of income delivery payments – monthly income or single lump sum payments – can impact communities. “We need to see if these effects last,” says Suri. “Does it just disappear, or was this enough to keep them going forever?” 

Financial Times reporter Andrew Hill highlights “The Geek Way,” a new book by Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee that explores the success behind “geek” culture in companies. Hill notes that McAfee has, “pinpointed some important norms sustaining the world’s most admired, and fastest growing, organizations.”

Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee speaks with Bloomberg hosts Carol Massar and Tim Steinbeck about his new book “The Geek Way” and the future of artificial intelligence. “I personally am not worried about the existential, the alignment risks of AI,” says McAfee. “All very powerful tools bring risks and harm with them, and they demand vigilance. We have got to be careful about it. I don’t think AI is any big exception to that trend or requires us to do radically different things, we just have to be vigilant and stop the bad uses.”

Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee speaks with CNBC about the contributing factors to a successful start-up company. “Incumbent industries and companies are so fond of really elaborate planning cycles and the geeks just build things, get feedback and do again on a fast cadence,” says McAfee.  

Researchers at MIT and elsewhere have found that “Black women who work in predominately white teams may have worse job outcomes,” reports Ruth Umoh for Fortune. The researchers, “studied 9,037 inexperienced new hires in a large, elite professional service firm from 2014 to 2020, focusing on retention and promotion rates,” explains Umoh. “Black women were the only demographic whose turnover and promotion rates were significantly affected by the racial identify of their coworkers.”

Writing for Fortune, Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee discusses his new book “The Geek Way,” and explains how the structure of Montessori schools are influencing modern day business and company culture. “A bunch of geeks are now doing for companies what Maria Montessori did for schools,” writes McAfee. “They’re reimagining them, improving them, and exposing false assumptions. A large and growing cohort of business leaders are now building very different companies — and, not coincidentally, very successful ones.”

Principal Research Scientist Andrew McAfee discussed the impact of artificial intelligence and technology on businesses at the Fortune CFO Collaborative, reports Sheryl Estrada for Fortune. Generative AI is “going to diffuse throughout the economy,” said McAfee. “It’s going to separate winners from losers, and it’s going to turbocharge the winners faster than you and I have been expecting.”  

Writing for Fortune, Sloan research fellow Michael Schrage and his colleagues, explain how AI-enabled key performance indicators (KPIs) can help companies better understand and measure success. “Driving strategic alignment within their organization is an increasingly important priority for senior executives,” they write. “AI-enabled KPIs are powerful tools for achieving this. By getting their data right, using appropriate organizational constructs, and driving a cultural shift towards data-driven decision making, organizations can effectively govern the creation and deployment of AI-enabled KPIs."