The Business Implications of Generative AI @ MIT (BIG.AI@MIT)

Enjoy pre-conference networking and breakfast.

MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, Thinkers50, and Accenture.

Session Lead & Moderator:

• Sinan Aral – Director, MIT IDE

Generative AI is a once-in-a-generation disruptive technology that has the potential to transform how work is performed across every industry and function. While its potential is becoming more tangible, the specifics of how Generative AI impacts organizations and roles is rapidly evolving along with the technology, challenging leaders to understand how, where, and when to best leverage investments in Generative AI to drive differentiated outcomes. 65% of executives can’t explain how their AI models make decisions. 78% of organizations use third-party AI tools, which is a concern given that 55% of all AI failures (e.g. hallucinations) come from third-party tools. And like any tool, GenAI and the underlying Large Language Models and associated generative Diffusion Models may generate out of date, biased, incorrect, or inconsistent results. The focus of this session is to bring together the world’s leading researchers in the GenAI space to discuss, debate, and propose the research necessary to understand the causal impact (positive and negative) on organizations, roles, and individuals in the context of the future of work.

Enjoy a 15-minute coffee break.

Session Lead & Moderator:

• Des Dearlove – Co-Founder, Thinkers50

For all the hype about GenAI, and all the doomsday predictions, the big (biggest) question is how significant will its impact be on humanity and the planet? Is it a game changer, or a whole new game? That is at the heart of concerns about job losses, algorithmic biases, ethical dilemmas, and a host of other issues. It is also the question on the minds of business leaders. Few business leaders doubt that AI has the power to transform the world we live in. But is it simply the next in a series of ‘disruptive innovations’, or is it a new paradigm altogether? Do our existing strategy and innovation frameworks, tools and theories still hold in this brave new world? Or do we need new thought-leadership to make sense of and navigate through the AI inflection point?

In this session, world-leading business thinkers discuss whether it’s time to throw away the old MBA toolkit and create a new one fit for the AI era.

Enjoy lunch and networking with conference attendees and invited speakers.

Session Lead & Moderator:

• Lan Guan – Chief AI Officer, Accenture

As generative AI technologies gain traction, businesses are seeking strategies to harness their potential while grappling with scaling challenges. This session will focus on cutting-edge applications of generative AI that have delivered significant business impact. We will examine trends, such as model consumption, customization, and the deployment of AI agents. Additionally, we will discuss the essential prerequisites for businesses to scale generative AI effectively to drive innovation and growth.

Enjoy a 15-minute coffee break.

Session Lead & Moderator:

• Bill Aulet – Managing Director, Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship

The question is not whether AI is coming but rather the question is how big, how fast and in what areas? While we might not be able to answer those questions, we do know that the future will be driven by entrepreneurs. Many of those entrepreneurs will be fueled by Venture Capital. In fact, today the dominant share of the all the venture capital funding being deployed is going to AI companies. In this session we will discuss what can we learn from the investment patterns evident from this tsunami. We will also look at this from an entrepreneur’s perspective and finally how AI is turbo charging the entrepreneurship process itself and the ramifications. All of this is cooking up a never before seen strange brew and in this session, we will take a peek in the kitchen to get some insights on the future.

Closing remarks from conference organizers.

Enjoy a networking reception and Innovation Showcase, featuring startups in the MIT Ecosystem

Conference concludes.

Sinan Aral a global authority on business analytics; award-winning researcher; entrepreneur and venture capitalist. He is the David Austin Professor of Management, Marketing, IT and Data Science at MIT, Director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy (IDE) and a Founding Partner at Manifest Capital. He was the Chief Scientist at SocialAmp, one of the first social commerce analytics companies (until its sale to Merkle in 2012) and at Humin, a social platform that the Wall Street Journal called the first “Social Operating System” (until its sale to Tinder in 2016). He is currently on the Advisory Boards of the Alan Turing Institute, the British National Institute for Data Science in London, the Center for Responsible Media Technology and Innovation in Bergen, Norway and C6 Bank, one of the first all-digital banks of Brazil. Sinan has helped leading Fortune 500 firms, including Facebook, Yahoo!, Twitter, LinkedIn, Snapchat, WeChat, Spotify, AirBnB, Microsoft, Walmart, IBM, Intel, Cisco, Oracle, SAP and The New York Times to realize business value from big data analytics, social media and IT investments. His research has won numerous awards including the Microsoft Faculty Fellowship, the PopTech Science Fellowship, an NSF CAREER Award, a Fulbright Scholarship and the Jamieson Award for Teaching Excellence (MIT Sloan’s highest teaching honor). In 2014, he was named one of the “World’s Top 40 Business School Professors Under 40.” In 2018, he became the youngest ever recipient of the Herbert Simon Award of Rajk László College in Budapest, Hungary. In the same year, his article on the spread of false news online was published on the cover of Science magazine and became the second most influential scientific publication of the year in any discipline. Sinan’s first book, The Hype Machine, which was named a 2020 Best Book on Artificial Intelligence by WIRED, a 2020 Porchlight Best “Big Ideas and New Perspectives” Book Award Winner and among the Best New Technology Books and Best New Economy Books to Read in 2021 by BookAuthority, became an instant classic and a must-read for business leaders at every level of management. A managerial economist and econometrician by training, Sinan’s expertise spans social networks, causal inference, the design and analysis of large-scale digital experiments, machine learning, predictive modeling, natural language processing, AI, big data, marketing, IT, social commerce, ecommerce, behavior change and economic productivity. He earned his PhD at MIT and completed his Master’s degrees at the London School of Economics and at Harvard. You can find Sinan on Twitter @sinanaral and on Instagram @professorsinan.

Bill Aulet is the Managing Director of the Martin Trust Center for MIT Entrepreneurship and Professor of the Practice at the MIT Sloan School of Management.

He is changing the way entrepreneurship is understood, taught, and practiced around the world. Bill is an award-winning educator and author whose current work is built off the foundation of his 25-year successful business career first at IBM and then as a three-time serial entrepreneur. During this time, he directly raised over a hundred million dollars and, more importantly, created hundreds of millions of dollars of shareholder value through his companies. Since 2009, he has been responsible for leading the development of entrepreneurship education across MIT at the Martin Trust Center. Bill’s first book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship, released in August 2013, has been translated into over 18 languages and has been the content for three online edX courses which have been taken by hundreds of thousands of people in 199 different countries. The accompanying follow-on book, Disciplined Entrepreneurship Workbook, was released in April 2017. Bill has widely published in in places such as the Wall Street Journal, TechCrunch, the Boston Globe, the Sloan Management Review, the Kauffman Foundation, Entrepreneur Magazine, MIT Sloan Experts and more. He has been a featured speaker on shows such as CNBC’s Squawk Box, BBC News, Bloomberg News as well as at events and conferences around the world.

He has degrees from Harvard and MIT, and is a board member of MITEK Systems (NASDAQ: MITK) and XL Fleet. (Private). He is also a Visiting Professor at University of Strathclyde (Scotland). On July 1, 2017, Bill was named a Professor of the Practice at MIT Sloan, the first at the school in the area of entrepreneurship since Alex d’Arbeloff held that title in 2003. For his efforts, Bill has earned external recognition as well including Boston 50 on Fire, 2017 Favorite MBA Professors from Poets and Quants, and 2018 Nannerl Keohane Distinguished Visiting Professorship at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University.

Des is a former columnist to The Times (London), contributing editor to Strategy+Business, and co-editor of the bestselling Financial Times Handbook of Management. He has taught at some of the world’s leading business schools, including IE Business School and the Said Business School at Oxford University, where he is an associate fellow. He is also the author of the Archie Greene trilogy of children’s books under the pen name D. D. Everest.

Lan Guan serves as chief AI officer for Accenture. In this role, she works closely with companies across industries and geographies to develop data and AI strategies that drive value and growth. Lan brings deep expertise in embedding AI into business processes and transforming data into actionable insights and leads. Lan is also a member of the Global Management Committee.

Lan also leads the Accenture Center for Advanced AI—the AI epicenter that enables enterprises to capture and create value from their AI investment by leveraging deep  expertise, differentiated scalable assets and solutions underpinned by data prowess and industry knowledge, and market-leading thought leadership and research.

Prior to this role, Lan was the global leader for Data & AI for Accenture Cloud First, where she focused on transforming data propelled by the Cloud Continuum into actionable plans and scalable solutions to maximize market opportunities for clients.

Lan serves on the advisory board of the AI4All, a nonprofit organization dedicated to increasing diversity and inclusion in AI education, research, development and policy. She is a founding member of the Stanford Institute for Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence (HAI)—an institute dedicated to advancing AI research, education, policy and practice to improve the human condition—where she established the Accenture Stanford Foundation Model Scholar Program.

Lan was listed as one of the Top 25 Consultants and Leaders in AI by The Consulting Report in 2023. She received the Outstanding 50 Asian American in Business award in 2023 and was the recipient of the Top Women Leaders in Consulting for 2022.

Lan holds an MBA degree in Computational Engineering from the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and a PhD ABD in Quantitative Econometrics from Wayne State University. She been awarded over ten patents in AI-related areas including content recommendations, digital marketing and sales optimization. Lan is an Adjunct Faculty with Data Science Institute at Columbia University.

Columbia Business School’s Rita McGrath is a best-selling author, a sought-after advisor and a speaker. Rita is considered one of the world’s top experts on strategy and innovation. She is the winner of the 2022 CK Prahalad award for scholarly impact on practice from the Strategic Management Society, and in the same year was inducted into the Business Excellence Hall of Fame. She ranks among the top 10 management thinkers globally, including the #1 award for strategy by Thinkers50. Rita’s most recent book is Seeing Around Corners: How to Spot Inflection Points in Business Before They Happen (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2019). Rita is the author of four other books, including the best-selling The End of Competitive Advantage (Harvard Business Review Press, 2013).

Rita is one of the most widely published authors in the Harvard Business Review, including the best-selling article “Discovery Driven Planning” (1995), which was recognized as an early articulation of today’s “lean” startup philosophy and was praised by Clayton Christensen as one of the most important ideas in management – ever. She is also a highly-respected academic researcher whose work has won awards from the most prestigious management journals.

On the lighter side, she was named by Fast Company Magazine as one of the 25 smartest women to follow on Twitter.

Scott D. Anthony is a Clinical Professor of Strategy at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth College. Scott’s ninth book—Anomalies Wanted: A Brief History of Disruption—will be released in 2025. His previous books include Dual Transformation, Eat, Sleep, Innovate, The Little Black Book of Innovation, and Seeing What’s Next. In 2023 Thinkers50 named him the world’s ninth most influential management thinker. He won the Thinkers50 Innovation Award in 2017.

H. James Wilson is global managing director of Technology Research and Thought Leadership at Accenture, where he leads research programs on the impact of technology on work. Jim is co-author of the best-selling, Human + Machine: Reimagining Work in the Age of AI (Harvard Business Review Press), which will be re-released in Fall 2024 with fresh focus on Generative AI. He is author or contributing author to twelve books on the impact of technology on business and society, including the 2023 Thinkers 50 award-winning Radically Human: How New Technology is Transforming Work and Shaping our Future (HBR Press).

Jim is a frequent contributor to MIT Sloan Management Review, Harvard Business Review, Wall Street Journal and other management publications.