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Articles by Michael Schrage
How to Reap Compound Benefits From Generative AI
Topics Subscribe Share Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Minneapolis Institute of Art In domain after domain, AI has compressed work that used to be expensive — generating drafts, code, prototypes, and analyses. The marginal cost of a first attempt has dropped sharply. What remains expensive is what happens after the output arrives: evaluating what gets generated.
Big Tech Owes Scholars
In a landmark copyright settlement — believed to be the largest of its kind in history — the AI company Anthropic recently agreed to pay approximately $1.5 billion to resolve claims that it illegally trained its chatbot Claude on roughly 500,000 books without first seeking permission from their authors or publishers. Call it progress; call it a down payment; but please don’t call it a solution. It’s not.
How to Reap Compound Benefits From Generative AI
David Kiron is the editorial director, research, of MIT Sloan Management Review and program lead for its Big Ideas research initiatives. Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk.
How to Reap Compound Benefits From Generative AI
Topics Column Our expert columnists offer opinion and analysis on important issues facing modern businesses and managers. More in this series Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Minneapolis Institute of Art Summary: For leaders, the old question was “How do we produce more, faster?” However, leaders at organizations pulling ahead in the race to derive ... value from generative AI also ask, “What worked or failed?
Vibe Analytics: Vibe Coding’s New Cousin Unlocks Insights - Tribune Content Agency
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focus on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk. Editor’s note: The author used GenAI tools as resources in the process of writing this article.
Vibe Analytics: Vibe Coding’s New Cousin Unlocks Insights
Vibe Analytics: Vibe Coding’s New Cousin Unlocks Insights The Excel spreadsheet era asked, “What happened?” The dashboard era asked, “Why did it happen?” The vibe era asks, “What insights emerge if we explore together?” Consider the gains that real-world companies are already making. Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images Summary: Traditional data analysis looks like this: Define questions; structure queries; execute models; visualize results. Vibe analytics collapses ...
Vibe Analytics: Vibe Coding’s New Cousin Unlocks Insights
An international team of scientists a family genome sequences known as “transposable elements,” and found they play a vital role in gene expression. Here’s what you’ll learn when you read this story: Around 45 percent of human DNA is made up of transposable elements, or TEs—genetic leftovers from …
Stop Deploying AI. Start Designing Intelligence - Tribune Content Agency
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk. David Kiron is the editorial director, research, of MIT Sloan Management Review and program lead for its Big Ideas research initiatives.
Stop Deploying AI. Start Designing Intelligence
Stop Deploying AI. Start Designing Intelligence Stephen Wolfram’s philosophical insights on computation offer actionable principles for designing intelligence environments that achieve lasting value from AI. Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images | National Gallery of Art, Washington Summary: If business leaders’ philosophy determines AI’s choice architecture, how should leaders put that philosophy into action? In their ongoing ...
The Great Power Shift: How Intelligent Choice Architectures Rewrite Decision Rights - Tribune Content Agency
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk.
The Great Power Shift: How Intelligent Choice Architectures Rewrite Decision Rights
Topics Strategic Measurement Strategic Measurement examines the role of key performance indicators (KPIs) as a leadership tool. More in this series Incorporating AI agents at scale transforms how enterprises define, design, and deploy decision environments.1 Our research shows that organizations using AI to generate sophisticated choice sets — rather than singular, “best,” or “optimal” solutions — achieve superior outcomes across diverse sectors.
Philosophy Eats AI - Tribune Content Agency
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk. David Kiron is the editorial director, research, of MIT Sloan Management Review and program lead for its Big Ideas research initiatives.
Philosophy Eats AI
Philosophy Eats AI Generating sustainable business value with AI demands critical thinking about the disparate philosophies determining AI development, training, deployment, and use. Carolyn Geason-Beissel/MIT SMR | Getty Images In 2011, coder-turned-venture-investor Marc Andreessen famously declared, “Software is eating the world” in the analog pages of The Wall Street Journal. His manifesto described a technology voraciously transforming every global industry it consumed.
Philosophy Eats AI
6 hours ago Husband Unconcerned as Wife Configures ChatGPT to Engage in Cuckolding Fantasy "I don’t really see it as a person or as cheating." Cuck Queen Look, we're not here to yuck anybody's yum. But as the New York Times reports, a … 9 hours ago Microsoft bundles Office AI features into Microsoft 365 and raises prices Microsoft finds new ways to get you to pay for AI in Office apps.
Intelligent Choices Reshape Decision-Making and Productivity - Tribune Content Agency
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk.
Intelligent Choices Reshape Decision-Making and Productivity
Better choices enable better decisions. Profitably thriving through market disruptions demands that executives recognize that better decisions aren’t enough — they need better choices. Choices are the raw material of decision-making; without diverse, detailed, and high-quality options, even the best decision-making processes underperform.
Intelligent Choices Reshape Decision-Making and Productivity
Better choices enable better decisions. Profitably thriving through market disruptions demands that executives recognize that better decisions aren’t enough — they need better choices. Choices are the raw material of decision-making; without diverse, detailed, and high-quality options, even the best decision-making processes underperform.
Intelligent Choices Reshape Decision-Making and Productivity
1 hour ago Four of the big banks had an idea a few years ago to deal with pesky customer complaints. Instead of using the long-standing Ombudsman for Banking Services and Investments, they would switch to a hand-picked alternative for their third-party dispute-resolution business. On Friday, this self-serving …
Daniel Kahneman: The Thought Leader interview
The Nobel Prize–winning economist parses the roles of emotion, cognition, and perception in the understanding of business risk. (originally published by Booz & Company) Photograph by Matthew Septimus A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?
The Future of Strategic Measurement: Enhancing KPIs With AI
The first 2024 Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy report looks at how organizations are using AI to evolve their key performance indicators (KPIs) to better align with their strategies and deliver on enterprise goals. Introduction Legacy key performance indicators (KPIs) increasingly fail to deliver the information and insights leaders need to succeed. They fall short in tracking progress, aligning people and processes, prioritizing resources, and advancing accountability.
How AI-enabled KPIs can help leaders align their companies—and get better results - NewsBreak
A vital question for organizations is: How do they measure success? As companies grow larger and more complex, determining what metrics to use to evaluate performance gets harder. Traditionally, defining key performance indicators, or KPIs, has been the job of senior executives, who relied on their own judgement, intuition, and experience. But legacy KPIs often score performance on suboptimal or even wrong measures.
Governance for Smarter KPIs
Without adaptation and refinement, static business metrics create two types of strategic risk. One is encouraging performance on the wrong measures. The 2008 global economic crisis, for example, was triggered in part by banks’ dependence on a then widely used metric: value at risk, which measures potential portfolio losses in normal market conditions at a single point in time.
Governance for Smarter KPIs - Tribune Content Agency
Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk.
Governance for Smarter KPIs
Topics Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy The Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy initiative explores the growing use of artificial intelligence in the business landscape. The exploration looks specifically at how AI is affecting the development and execution of strategy in organizations.
Strategic Alignment With AI and Smart KPIs
Aligning operations with strategy is a critical leadership task. Turbulent market conditions, agile competitors, and ongoing demands to digitally upgrade operations and processes make strategic alignment more challenging to manage.
Strategic Alignment With AI and Smart KPIs
Big Idea: Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy Research Highlight When organizations create forward-looking smart KPIs with AI, they see increased strategic alignment. Reading Time: 13 min Topics Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy The Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy initiative explores the growing use of artificial intelligence in the business landscape.
Strategic Alignment With AI and Smart KPIs - Tribune Content Agency (September 5, 2023)
MIT Sloan (AUTHOR’S BIO) David Kiron is the editorial director, research, of MIT Sloan Management Review and program lead for its Big Ideas research initiatives. Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk.
Improve Key Performance Indicators With AI
Big Idea: Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy Research Highlight Organizations that use AI to improve existing KPIs or create new ones realize more business benefits than organizations that adjust their KPIs without AI. Reading Time: 14 min Topics Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy The Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy initiative explores the growing use of artificial intelligence in the business landscape.
Improve Key Performance Indicators With AI - Tribune Content Agency (July 11, 2023)
MIT Sloan (AUTHOR’S BIO) Michael Schrage is a research fellow with the MIT Sloan School of Management’s Initiative on the Digital Economy. His research, writing, and advisory work focuses on the behavioral economics of digital media, models, and metrics as strategic resources for managing innovation opportunity and risk. David Kiron is the editorial director, research, of MIT Sloan Management Review and program lead for its Big Ideas research initiatives.
AI Is Helping Companies Redefine, Not Just Improve, Performance
Topics Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy The Artificial Intelligence and Business Strategy initiative explores the growing use of artificial intelligence in the business landscape. The exploration looks specifically at how AI is affecting the development and execution of strategy in organizations.
AI Is Helping Companies Redefine, Not Just Improve, Performance
11 lesser-known iPhone tricks that'll change how you use your phone The iPhone has been one of the best smartphones on the market for over a decade. Even if you buy an old model, you’ll still get years of use out of …
The recommender revolution
As Amazon’s Jeff Bezos would cheerfully agree, insightful recommendations make for great business. People like you really do want to know what people like you like. That knowledge proves ideal for training ever-smarter algorithms; the more data, the merrier. From TikTok to Twitter to Meta to LinkedIn, the world’s most influential digital platforms constantly (machine) learn to offer better recommendations and advice.
Measuring the Post-Pandemic Workforce: Empowerment vs. Oversight
The COVID-19 pandemic accelerated and redefined how organizations monitor and measure performance. As organizations prepare to lead their post-pandemic hybrid workforce, leaders face critical choices about how best to measure and monitor their workers’ performance. Should leadership use new measurement technologies to double down on greater oversight? Or are these capabilities better deployed to empower workers?
How Digital Transformation Disrupts Legacy Leaders
Topics Future of Leadership in the Digital Economy Digitalization and other critical factors are transforming what it means to be a great leader in a new environment. Discover the cultural and strategic shifts organizations must embrace to prepare their leaders to succeed. See All Articles in This Section Hear the key findings from the MIT SMR-Cognizant 2021 Future of Leadership Global Executive Survey and Research Report. Digitalization has won, but has leadership lost?
To Improve Performance, Audit Your Employees’ Emails
Is your inbox littered with internal correspondence that narrows your pupils while raising your blood pressure? Are you cc:ed or bcc:ed on email exchanges that make you occasionally wonder what your direct reports, and their clients, actually do for a living? (My particular irk is the “forward” linking me to long spools of detailed correspondence that I have zero desire, or need, to review.) If so, then you’re only just peeking into the abyss of digital dysfunction.
What people like you like
Recommendation Engines by Michael Schrage, MIT Press, 2020 I don’t set much store in the endless stream of recommendations offered by Amazon, Netflix, Spotify, and most other online businesses. Occasionally, a book, flick, or song pops up that delights me, but most of the suggestions I get either miss the mark or appear suspiciously advantageous to recommendation engine operators and their advertisers.
How Procurement Teams Can Find a Competitive Edge
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The Arguments Your Company Needs
Asked several years ago to describe the most important argument taking place at Walmart, then-CEO Lee Scott immediately replied, “The size of our stores.” The world’s largest retailer was debating just how small its footprints and formats could be while still serving customer needs and its own brand equity promise. That conversation, Scott said, provoked a lot of new thinking and analysis. The most important argument at a fast-growing Web 2.0 services provider revolved around its “freemium” offer.
Team Chemistry Is the New Holy Grail of Performance Analytics
A talented videogame-designing friend had a ready quip whenever start-up executives asked him if he was a “team player.” “Yes,” he always responded, “team captain.” He usually got hired. “Makes teams better” is fast-becoming both an essential ingredient to getting hired and a mission-critical skill-set worth measuring.
Motivating Your Workers With Opportunity Marketplaces
Organizations constrained to offer workers financial incentives might consider a new approach: opportunity marketplaces. The COVID-19 crisis has made organizations vastly more aware of the need for greater flexibility, adaptability, and communications in the distributed workplace. Getting work done well and on time is job one, but what needs to come next? How do you quickly, cheaply, adaptively, and thoughtfully set yourself up for a future requiring unprecedented workplace and workforce agility?
Confronting the Pain of Innovation
Working “out of your comfort zone” is the euphemism; the organizational reality is “working through pain.” Innovation hurts. Every organization I’ve observed that’s serious about being innovative is filled with people in genuine pain — not just stress or anxiety or deadline pressure, and certainly not discomfort. Pain.
Make your future self work: Pareto performance in pandemic times and beyond
Michael Schrage examines the various roles of models, prototypes, and simulations as collaborative media for innovation risk management. He has served as an advisor on innovation issues and investments to major firms, including Mars, Procter & Gamble, Google, Intel, BT, Siemens, NASDAQ, IBM, and Alcoa. In addition, Schrage has advised segments of the national security community on cyber conflict and cybersecurity issues.
Good Leaders Don’t Use Bad Words
During a painfully dull futures workshop Down Under, a simple word change helped transform a stagnant discussion. The facilitator, with a world-class flair for bafflegab and platitude, had asked the group to envision products customers might desire a decade hence. The conversation regurgitated cliché after customer-centric product cliché until the moment the team rejected and replaced the facilitator’s language.
Radical Candor for Today’s Teams
Webinar Radical Candor for Today’s Teams November 05, 2019 Runtime 1:01:31 Leadership, Teamwork A webinar for managers who need to balance frank feedback with data-driven performance and inclusivity. advertisement New ways of working require a whole new suite of performance development tools. Feedback, leaders have realized, needs to be immediate, frequent, and frank. And leaders are also welcoming diversity and inclusion as mandates that lead to more effective and creative teams.
Don’t Let Metrics Critics Undermine Your Business
Increasingly, the best strategies have the best metrics. advertisement The irresistible rise of data-driven, analytics-enriched digital instrumentation and decisions has provoked an intellectual backlash. Call it a counterrevolution. Those lucky employees who haven’t been automated into professional obsolescence instead find themselves enduring what economic historian Jerry Z. Muller calls the “tyranny of metrics.” Numbers rule their workplace lives, and there’s no escape.
Who—and What—Will Customers Become? - DesignIntelligence
Innovation transforms the customer as well as the product As Francis Bacon declared roughly five hundred years ago, “He that will not apply new remedies must expect new evils: for time is the greatest innovator.” The whole premise and promise of innovation is “change.” How should those changes shape the customer vision? Innovation influences the vision of the customer; the vision of the customer influences innovation. Serious innovators strive to understand and influence both.
What Baseball Can Teach You About Using Data to Improve Yourself
An athletic mediocrity by most Major League measures, Trevor Bauer became a $13 million-a-year All-Star pitcher thanks to his singular talent: a relentless, data-driven focus on self-improvement. “I wasn’t a natural born athlete,” Bauer told a Sports Illustrated reporter in August 2011. “I’m not that strong. I’m not fast. I’m not explosive. I can’t jump.” So how was he selected third overall in the major league draft?
What Baseball Can Teach You About Using Data to Improve Yourself
HBR Staff/Yagi Studio/Getty Images An athletic mediocrity by most Major League measures, Trevor Bauer became a $13 million-a-year All-Star pitcher thanks to his singular talent: a relentless, data-driven focus on self-improvement. “I wasn’t a natural born athlete,” Bauer told a Sports Illustrated reporter in August 2011. “I’m not that strong. I’m not fast. I’m not explosive. I can’t jump.” So how was he selected third overall in the major league draft?
Does AI-Flavored Feedback Require a Human Touch?
Companies must choose whether humans or machines should get the last word on employee performance. advertisement Digital tools and technologies are now relentlessly and remorselessly transforming how performance management works. Customized and continuous data-driven feedback is becoming a new normal for enterprises worldwide. This feedback appears both qualitatively and quantitatively superior to its performance review precursors and should lead to better outcomes.
How to Make Customer Service, and Customers, Pay
While waiting (interminably) on hold for a human customer service agent, a horrible entrepreneurial revelation flashed before my eyes. If the automated voice on the line had asked, “Press #1 to pay $5 to immediately reach a representative,” I’d have hit that button in a heartbeat. Heck, if my wait had exceeded 25 minutes, I might have gone as high as $7 or $8. I hate being on hold. Does that make me an impatient sucker? Someone who appreciates the value of my time?
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