HBS Managing the Future of Work

How AI shifts enterprise decision-making into self-driving mode

For decades, enterprise systems vendors have promised legacy businesses virtual omniscience—decision-making informed by real-time, comprehensive views of their organizations’ activities and relevant external factors. This holy grail has eluded large established organizations, with their complex agglomerations of systems. Silicon Valley software developer Aera Technology touts an AI-assisted upgrade, tapping disparate systems and data flows to provide comprehensible and timely recommendations and automated decision-making. President and CEO, Fred Laluyaux, explains how advances in computing power coupled with vast stores of data are ushering in a new mode of operations, with computers handling more routine analysis and decision-making. This, in turn, is accelerating the automation of previously “safe” knowledge work. Laluyaux discusses the benefits and the organizational changes and challenges.

Artificial intelligence. Robotics. The Gig Economy. Globalization. The world is changing at a dizzying pace in ways that will have a profound effect on the economy, jobs and the flow of talent. How will firms cope with the changes ahead and what steps do they need to take today? Each episode features faculty from the world’s leading business school interviewing CEOs, technologists and experts on the bleeding edge discussing how to survive and thrive by managing the future of work.