MIT Sloan Management Review Article on Humanizing Tech May Be the New Competitive Advantage

Trust in technology is being eroded by concerns about data security — and if tech leaders want that trust back, they need to think about their products’ privacy implications.

At Google’s annual developer conference, Google I/O 2018, the company’s CEO Sundar Pitchai proudly demonstrated Google Duplex, a new artificial intelligence voice technology, making a remarkably human-sounding reservation over the phone. The problem was that the actual human on the other line did not know she was interacting with a bot. Only after Google faced backlash over concerns about this kind of deception did the company agree to release Duplex with disclosure built in.

About the Author

Bala Iyer is the dean of faculty and a professor in the Technology, Operations, and Information Management Division at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. He tweets @BalaIyer. Kristen Getchell is a visiting associate professor and director of rhetoric in the Arts and Humanities Division at Babson College in Wellesley, Massachusetts. She tweets @KMgetch. Fritz Fleischmann is a professor in the Arts and Humanities Division at Babson College.

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