MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Embracing AI When Your Industry Is in Flux

One of the great challenges we have seen businesses face in recent years is how they approach data and analytics (and now artificial intelligence) when their industries are undergoing major transformation. It’s hard enough to create a data-driven culture, compete on analytics, develop data-driven products and services, and so forth under normal business conditions, as we noted in our March column about the newest NewVantage Partners survey on big data and AI. But doing it while your business and industry are transforming — the old line of changing out a jet engine while the plane is flying through turbulence at 35,000 feet — is really tough.

It’s so difficult, in fact, that we always have our doubts when executives claim to have done it successfully. We are much more trusting when we’re told that the organization is simply making progress toward the goal.

About the Author

Thomas H. Davenport (@tdav) is the President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a visiting professor at Oxford’s Saïd Business School, and a fellow of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. Randy Bean (@randybeannvp) is an industry thought leader, author, and CEO of NewVantage Partners, a strategic advisory and management consulting firm that he founded in 2001. He is the author of the forthcoming book Fail Fast, Learn Faster: Lessons in Data-Driven Leadership in an Age of Disruption, Big Data, and AI, which will be published by Wiley in August 2021.

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