Without a retail website as an "intermediary," shoppers can find their desired products more efficiently, since an AI algorithm finds results from across the internet and compiles them in one location, said principal research scientist George Westerman. He questioned the reliability and trustworthiness of the results and who might benefit from them. "Who's influencing the recommendations it gives you?" he said. "It's unclear how neutral AI results are because they've got to make money somehow."

To drive up AI adoption, associate professor Jackson G. Lu recommends that leaders start by steering workers toward tasks that AI clearly handles better than humans and where personalization is unnecessary. Then, he advises gradually incorporating AI into tasks that involve taste, fairness, or empathy — while preserving human oversight and allowing people to customize the results. "Get the fit right," says Lu, "and even AI skeptics become power users."

"Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate," said Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu. "Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too." If the plans pan out, "one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator," Mr. Acemoglu said.

Professor of the practice Zeynep Ton said: "The status quo mindset in leaders is to see labor as a cost to be minimized. Exemplary companies think of employees as drivers of customer satisfaction, profitability and growth."

Associate professor Christopher Palmer said defaulting on a car payment is usually a borrower's last resort. Since people often need cars to get to work they're more likely to not pay other bills first. "That could include not paying their mortgages or their rent, in part because it takes a long time to evict someone or to foreclose on a house," he said. That's why he said auto delinquencies are like a canary in the coal mine; another indicator of how squeezed consumers are.

Professor Andrew W. Lo is currently testing to see whether a generative AI model could pass the fiduciary exam. The aim is to assess whether this means AI would be able to provide an investor with sound advice.

Research scientist Christian Catalini warned that without interoperability, the U.S. could stumble into a system of "corp chains": closed, proprietary payment networks reminiscent of the 19th-century railroad gauge wars, when incompatible tracks crippled trade. The lesson for digital money is straightforward. If we don't get those rules now right, he said, today's payment networks could harden into incompatible rails: "Money, a digital dollar on one network, will not move seamlessly to the other."

Between 2023 and 2024, the cost in the US of a data breach has increased nearly 10%. The reason this market is moving like a freight train is because it's hard to protect against. Professor Stuart Madnick said: "The good guys are getting better, but the bad guys are getting badder even faster." One way that cyber criminals are staying ahead of the curve is AI. "We've seen several examples of how cyber attacks have been greatly accelerated due to AI tools," said Madnick.

Five principles make up "dynamic work design," described in the book "There's Got to Be a Better Way," by professor Nelson P. Repenning and senior lecturer Donald Kieffer.

Research by senior lecturer Hal Gregersen suggests that leaders who prioritise questions over immediate answers tend to navigate uncertainty more effectively. This shift fundamentally changes how problems are approached and solutions are developed.

"The argument for why more data centers might lower residential bills is because you're going to get more electrons to spread those fixed costs over," said Christopher Knittel, associate dean for climate and sustainability. Knittel and co-authors put out a paper raising the possibility that making data centers more flexible in terms of their demand could have the effect of incentivizing old coal plants to stay open.