Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run the World, January 7, 2020, reviewed

By @SimonCocking review of Competing in the Age of AI: Strategy and Leadership When Algorithms and Networks Run thWorld Hardcover – January 7, 2020. Available from Harvard Business Review Press and also here.

AI-centric organizations exhibit a new operating architecture, redefining how they create, capture, share, and deliver value.

Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani show how reinventing the firm around data, analytics, and AI removes traditional constraints on scale, scope, and learning that have restricted business growth for hundreds of years.

From Airbnb to Ant Financial, Microsoft to Amazon, research shows how AI-driven processes are vastly more scalable than traditional processes, allow massive scope increase, enabling companies to straddle industry boundaries, and create powerful opportunities for learning–to drive ever more accurate, complex, and sophisticated predictions.

When traditional operating constraints are removed, strategy becomes a whole new game, one whose rules and likely outcomes this book will make clear. Iansiti and Lakhani:

• Present a framework for rethinking business and operating models
• Explain how “collisions” between AI-driven/digital and traditional/analog firms are reshaping competition, altering the structure of our economy, and forcing traditional companies to rearchitect their operating models
• Explain the opportunities and risks created by digital firms
• Describe the new challenges and responsibilities for the leaders of both digital and traditional firms

Packed with examples–including many from the most powerful and innovative global, AI-driven competitors–and based on research in hundreds of firms across many sectors, this is your essential guide for rethinking how your firm competes and operates in the era of AI.

Competing in the Age of AI reviewed

This book went officially on sale this week, and is a timely overview of the most relevant issues that need to be considered. In many sections of the book there is a keen desire to relate current trends to past historical precedents. This back history, for example Jeff Bezos’s seminal memo in 2002, and Satya Nadella’s restructuring of Microsoft all offer relevant and useful context as the authors aim to ground us in the issues we need to consider now, and going forwards.

We were also delighted, relieved perhaps, that, unlike in Bernard Marr’s whistle stop, almost sales brochure like spin through fifty companies using AI, in this book the issue of ethics has a whole chapter devoted to it. In some ways this chapter, ‘The Ethics of Digital Scale, Scope and Learning’ although situated towards the end of the book, is one of the most important ones in the book to read as soon as possible. As China looks to use AI and blockchain based technologies to further increase it’s level of surveillance on its citizens, the question of ethics, and responsible use of AI and associated technologies is vital to address now.

The book is, by comparison with some we have reviewed recently, well written, readable, engaging and accessible to the general reader and c-suit decision makers. Who, ideally, will be reading this and taking it on board when they make management decisions going forwards – before it is all done by the inhouse AI operating systems for us!

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