Thomas H. Davenport

• Ph.D.
• Professor (Full) at Babson College

In a world where ChatGPT took us by storm, a far more powerful revolution is unfolding: AI Agents. This comprehensive guide on agentic AI offers a clear, jargon-free strategic roadmap to understanding and applying this technology.

Generative AI (Gen AI) is shaping the future of marketing. In the next decade, Gen AI will influence how marketers interact and communicate with customers, help create and deliver marketing content (text, images, and video), and inform methods for researching and developing new products and services. In both service and sales settings, Gen AI will...

This paper explores the evolution of customer data technologies from their inception in the 1980s to the present and speculates about the future. The paper highlights promises made and challenges encountered, examining the rise of database marketing, the impact of the Internet and social media, and the ongoing struggles with personalisation and cus...

This paper explores the integration of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) in voice of the customer (VoC) analysis to provide deeper understanding of prospects and customers. GenAI has enormous potential to enhance customer satisfaction, refine products and services and improve the customer experience. This speculative paper illustrates how...

Companies have a growing problem of information overload regarding markets and competitors, which often prevents the C-suite from making the best decisions available given the data at its disposal. While generative AI is often pitched as a way to create new content (information in, message out), it can work just as well — or depending on the applic...

While all functional areas in organizations are benefiting from the recent development in generative artificial intelligence (GAI), marketing has been particularly affected positively by this breakthrough innovation. However, scholars have not paid attention to the transformative impacts GAI has on marketing activities. This editorial article aims...

Ali Aslan Gümüsay, Thomas Bohné, and Thomas Davenport describe the types of decisions that AI can help with and illuminate the emerging AI-supported decision processes that organizations should consider.

Personalization based on customer attributes and behavior is a familiar concept among marketers, and artificial intelligence is making it increasingly effective. AI-based hyper-personalization employs both sophisticated methods and far more data than previous methods and is far more precise as a result. Thomas H. Davenport discusses the role of AI...

Purpose The authors’ research identified seven best practices of leading companies with a particularly aggressive “All-in-on-AI” approach to Artificial Intelligence technology. 10; Design/Methodology/Approach The article examines how successful companies are reskilling and upskilling their employees to help develop, interpret and improve AI system...

Artificial intelligence applications are prevalent in the research lab and in startups, but relatively few have found their way into healthcare provider organizations. Adoption of AI innovations in consumer and business domains is typically much faster. While such delays are frustrating to those who believe in the potential of AI to transform healt...

Two management and technology experts show that AI is not a job destroyer, exploring worker-AI collaboration in real-world work settings. This book breaks through both the hype and the doom-and-gloom surrounding automation and the deployment of artificial intelligence-enabled—“smart”—systems at work. Management and technology experts Thomas Davenpo...

Artificial intelligence is the most important new technology of the age, but it comes in many varieties, and businesses face a range of challenges in effectively deploying it throughout their organizations. Tom Davenport takes a pragmatic but positive approach to AI’s long-term potential, describing effective approaches to creating and implementing...

Insights from organizations that are navigating the novel challenges of the digital workplace. How can technology and analytics help companies manage people? Why do teams working remotely still need leaders? When should organizations use digital assessment tools for gauging talent and potential? This book from MIT Sloan Management Review answers qu...

Purpose The evolving digital transformations of organizational processes involve vast complexities. Factors such as labor resources at the individual and team levels that integrate and utilize information resources and evolving technologies to achieve collective intelligence are essential to this process. In order to better understand evolving dema...

A clear-eyed look at how AI can complement (rather than eliminate) human jobs, with real-world examples from companies that range from Netflix to Walmart. Descriptions of AI's possible effects on businesses and their employees cycle between utopian hype and alarmist doomsaying. This book from MIT Sloan Management Review avoids both these extremes,...

A clear-eyed look at how AI can complement (rather than eliminate) human jobs, with real-world examples from companies that range from Netflix to Walmart. Descriptions of AI's possible effects on businesses and their employees cycle between utopian hype and alarmist doomsaying. This book from MIT Sloan Management Review avoids both these extremes,...

In the future, artificial intelligence (AI) is likely to substantially change both marketing strategies and customer behaviors. Building from not only extant research but also extensive interactions with practice, the authors propose a multidimensional framework for understanding the impact of AI involving intelligence levels, task types, and wheth...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a fundamental, pervasive economic and organizational phenomenon that holds many theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges for management and information systems scholars. As the adoption of AI technologies across organizations is increasing, AI may alter working and organizing in significant...

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is emerging as a fundamental, pervasive economic and organizational phenomenon that holds many theoretical and practical opportunities and challenges for management and information systems scholars. As the adoption of AI technologies across organizations is increasing, AI may alter working and organizing in significant...

The complexity and rise of data in healthcare means that artificial intelligence (AI) will increasingly be applied within the field. Several types of AI are already being employed by payers and providers of care, and life sciences companies. The key categories of applications involve diagnosis and treatment recommendations, patient engagement and a...

How organizations can adapt to a constantly changing business environment by being flexible but focused, embracing change, and moving fast. In the new digital world, the unknowns are never-ending. Our ability to embrace the demands of change has become a prerequisite for success. It's not easy. We don't work the way we did last year. Next year, it...

Analytics have been employed by companies for several decades, but now many firms are interested in building their capabilities for artificial intelligence (AI). Many AI systems, however, are based on statistics and other forms of analytics. Companies can get a “running start” on AI by building upon their analytical competencies. The focus of this...

Cutting through the hype, a practical guide to using artificial intelligence for business benefits and competitive advantage. In The AI Advantage, Thomas Davenport offers a guide to using artificial intelligence in business. He describes what technologies are available and how companies can use them for business benefits and competitive advantage....

In organizations of any size, it is impossible for one analyst to do all the necessary analytics work. Therefore, the topic of human analytical resources quickly becomes one of assembling and managing an analytical team. This chapter focuses on assembling and managing teams of analytical people to analyze data and assist the organization in making...

The relationship between management and digital technology: experts present a new agenda for the practice of management. Digital technology has profoundly affected the ways that businesses design and produce goods, manage internal communication, and connect with customers. But the next phase of the digital revolution raises a new set of questions a...

The application of AI to digital touch points and web content is transforming the B2B space by enhancing descriptive categories of business entities across industry sectors. Link https://hbr.org/2018/01/machine-learning-can-help-b2b-firms-learn-more-about-their-customers

This paper provides an overview of the emergence of artificial intelligence in accounting and auditing. We discuss the current capabilities of cognitive technologies and the implications these technologies will have on human auditors and the audit process itself. We also provide industry examples of artificial intelligence implementation by Big-4 a...

Case study that addresses the design and development of analytics-based Data products (also published in SMR)

An increasing number of companies are creating products that combine data with analytical capabilities. Creating an effective development process for these data products requires following well-established steps — and adding a few new ones, too. In this article, we will describe what leading companies are doing to create, refine, and generate value...

Many marketing activities will be largely automated by 2025. While people will still be responsible for marketing management and outcomes, substantially fewer people in the marketing team will oversee a larger number of automated systems. While there have been some attempts to identify what marketing organisations and practitioners need to do to ta...

Purpose – The author, an internationally known IT expert, aims to explain how big data is being used by leading corporations to promote better decision making, especially about innovation. Design/methodology/approach – Big data is the collection and interpretation of massive data sets, made possible by vast computing power that monitors a variety...