Brew Markets Prof. Karim Lakhani: Revisiting the Corporate Challenge of Adopting AI
Dec 26, 2025
Prof. Karim Lakhani, a Harvard Business School professor, shares insights on AI adoption and productivity. He advocates for 'clinical trials' in corporations to assess AI's impact before hefty investments. Lakhani highlights P&G's findings on enhanced worker emotions and productivity with AI. He emphasizes that successful AI integration requires a shift in company workflows, where leadership plays a crucial role. Discussing the balance between technology and management, he warns of the urgency for firms to adapt or risk obsolescence.
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Run AI Clinical Trials First
- Run randomized "clinical trials" before wide AI rollouts to measure causal impact.
- Randomize access to tools so you can trust productivity and side-effect estimates.
AI Becomes A Teammate
- AI can shift from a tool to a teammate, boosting productivity and bringing missing expertise into teams.
- Users in the Procter & Gamble trial reported more positive emotions and less negativity when using AI.
AI's Jagged Performance Frontier
- AI shows a jagged performance frontier: it can dramatically help creative tasks but harm numeric tasks prone to hallucination.
- In the BCG study, creativity scores rose ~40% while spreadsheet tasks fell ~20% two years ago.