Visit hbs.edu

Because AI

is only half the answer

“If your workers aren’t frustrated using AI, then you’re nowhere near where you should be.”

Mary Erdoes Sir Martin Sorrell , D^3 Advisory Council Member and CEO of JPMorgan Asset and Wealth Management

Because AI

is a superpower

The People, Processes, and Politics of AI ROI

Executives rarely doubt AI’s potential anymore, but many are quietly unsure of their organization’s ability to make it pay off. If you’ve poured time and money into AI pilots and yet the bottom line barely moves, you’re not alone. In the new HBR article “Overcoming the Organizational Barriers to AI Adoption,” Jin Li, Feng Zhu—head […]

Green leaf with digital circuit overlay concept

Using AI to Identify Climate Innovation

For decades, the business conversation around climate change has been focused on how to manage, mitigate, and withstand the risks and downsides. But what if there’s a more important story about opportunity that we’ve been missing? In the new article, “Tracking Business Opportunities for Climate Solutions Using AI in Regulated Accounting Reports,” published in Nature […]

A friendly chatbot with glowing blue eyes and a hi speech bubble, emerging from a smartphone screen, against a purple background

Navigating the Promise and Peril of AI Companions for Older Adults

What happens when the same technology powering a customer service chatbot becomes a daily companion for someone losing their memory? In the new Nature Mental Health Comment article, “AI Companions for Dementia,” Julian De Freitas, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and Associate at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard (D^3), […]

Abstract glowing digital book made of illuminated circuits and data streams on a dark background

Explanations on Mute: Why We Turn Away From Explainable AI

We live in an age where the call for transparent or “Explainable AI” (XAI) has never been louder. Businesses agree, with 85% believing transparency is critical to winning consumer trust. [1] Given this consensus, it seems reasonable to assume that when an explanation for a high-stakes AI decision is available, people will naturally seek it […]

D^3 and Microsoft Launch Accelerated AI Research Initiative

Harvard Business School faculty, in collaboration with Microsoft and its clients, will study human-AI work, publish evidence-based blueprints, and deliver custom workshops for executives to rapidly reinvent global businesses as Frontier Firms; Eli Lilly and Company, EY, Lumen Technologies, and Nestlé among 14 organizations in the inaugural cohort. BOSTON, November 18, 2025 – Faculty at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard today […]

Because AI

transforms productivity

Written By
Nova School of Business & Economics

“…what’s different is the promise of this technology. AI has the capabilities of summarizing and allowing people to access tacit knowledge that is typically, you know, exclusive to experts.”

Raffaella Sadun John Winsor , Co-Principal Investigator at the Digital Reskilling Lab

The Three Ways Professionals Work with AI – Which One Are You?

Workers have moved past the initial shock of Generative AI’s arrival. The tool is here, it’s accessible, and it might be open in one of your browser tabs right now. But a critical challenge remains: knowing that you should use AI is very different from knowing how to weave it into the complex, interconnected reality […]

The Agentic AI Reality Check

Agentic AI has recently been moving through a period of heightened excitement and innovation, but empirical data on how these tools are actually being used has been scarce. The new study “The Adoption and Usage of AI Agents: Early Evidence from Perplexity,” by Jeremy Yang, Assistant Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and […]

Because AI

changes everything

Our digital future is being invented today

Our work at the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard focuses our 14 labs around six communities of practice to produce and share research-rooted knowledge on how society and business are interacting with artificial intelligence (AI) and digital technologies.

Engage With Us

Join Our Community

Ready to dive deeper with the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard? Subscribe to our newsletter, contribute to the conversation and begin to invent the future for yourself, your business and society as a whole.