In this special episode, host Chris Linnane shares exclusive, unaired clips from his conversations with Harvard Business School faculty members Sunil Gupta, Anthony Mayo, Christina Wallace, Felix Oberholzer-Gee, and V.G. Narayanan–all on the topic of artificial intelligence (AI).
In this special episode featuring season two bonus content, host Chris Linnane shares exclusive, unaired clips from his conversations with Harvard Business School faculty members on the topic of AI and navigating the future of the workplace.
Tune in to hear from Sunil Gupta on marketing strategies, Anthony Mayo on effective leadership, Christina Wallace on entrepreneurial mindset, Felix Oberholzer-Gee on business strategy, and V.G. Narayanan on accounting.
Catch up on Season 2 of The Parlor Room:
Watch The Parlor Room on YouTube: https://hbs.me/4j99nbwc
Editor's Note: The following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio fileThe following was prepared by a machine algorithm and may not perfectly reflect the interview's audio file
Chris Linnane:The Parlor Room is an official podcast of Harvard Business School Online.
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Chris Linnane: Welcome to a special episode of The Parlor Room. My name is Chris Linnane, and I'm the creative director at Harvard Business School Online. This entire episode is dedicated to all things AI, featuring insights from some of Harvard Business School's top faculty. We'll explore how AI is shaping leadership, marketing, personalization, digital transformation, and the importance of staying human in an increasingly digital world.
So, let's kick things off with Professor Tony Mayo, who teaches leadership principles and organizational leadership online at Harvard Business School. Professor Mayo's perspective sets the perfect tone for our discussion.
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Chris Linnane: Are there emerging issues that you see impacting leadership coming in the future?
Anthony Mayo: Yeah. So I think there's three or four that I can think of that are big issues for leaders right now. So one is this notion of artificial intelligence, or I just recently heard somebody call it augmented intelligence. So it's not artificial, which I kind of like that. So it's augmenting what we do.
So it's sort of figuring out-- and I think that's a broader category that leaders face is how to think about technology and how we think about that as an enabler for success? And how do we think about it augmenting and supporting what we do? Well, what new things does it provide? What challenges does it provide? So I think as a leader, trying to figure out how do I harness that in a way for good as opposed to evil is important.
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Chris Linanne: Next, we'll hear from Professor Christina Wallace, who explores how AI is revolutionizing marketing. From low-cost tools to impactful strategies, she highlights how startups can leverage AI for efficiency and creativity. And after this episode, be sure to check out Professor Wallace's brand new HBS Online course, entrepreneurial marketing.
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Chris Linnane: What are some free or low-cost marketing tactics that early-stage startups can use effectively?
Christina Wallace: So, actually, I am a little bit excited about AI. I'm a lot excited about AI. I'm also a lot scared about AI. I will be clear. But in the role of entrepreneurial marketing, AI and the generative tools, both visual and verbal, that have been created even in just the last six months, create a really low-cost set of tools for marketers to get things up and running.
For example, back when I started my first company in 2011, we needed a brand. We needed a visual identity. We needed a website. And we spent thousands of dollars on a designer to help us build this thing out. We had to go and code some of this. There were at least some templates.
But still, it was really manual and really heavy lift just to put up a storefront to look official, to say, hey, we're here. Does anyone like what we have to offer? And I could do that exact same workflow today in about an hour and a half, using entirely free tools, which is incredible.
So whether it is, a marketer is thinking about, I want to test out two different brands-- I think maybe the positioning or the voice or the visuals could be this, or it could be that, and I'm not sure which they want. You could literally create both using a generative AI branding tool now. Even if it's not free, 50 bucks at most, put up some ads on Instagram or Facebook or LinkedIn and direct a little bit of traffic-- $100 worth of social media ads toward these two brands.
Run an A/B test. See who clicks. See which ones-- actually, you can compare the numbers against each other. You'll know in three days which brand actually lands. And you'll get insight from the platforms on who your customer is. So there's a ton that you can learn and get started really, really quickly.
Whether it's a branding question or getting a landing page up with the value prop, seeing who signs up for your website before you've launched, all the way down to being able to actually stand up an e-commerce page on Shopify for 100 bucks. I mean, there's a lot of tools available to get started quickly.
Chris Linnane: Based on where we are right now with AI, if you had to choose where it's more valuable, is it in creating assets for marketing or analyzing marketing?
Christina Wallace: This one's hard because, as an artist who is friends with a lot of artists, I feel very strongly that I want to continue to pay artists to do the creative work that needs to be done because AI can only generate based off of the data set it has. So if we stop creating new things, we're going to end up just recycling the same ideas over and over again. That said--
Chris Linnane: Uh-oh.
Christina Wallace: --I think in the earliest stages, AI is good-- generative AI tools are good to get you a good enough. Then you can show up to hiring a designer, hiring a photographer, hiring whatever you need on the creative side to show up as-- especially if you're not a creative-- to say it's not just I need a brand. It's I want a brand that looks like this and feels like this and sounds like this.
And I'm going to bring some assets to that conversation, especially ones that I've had a chance to test already. And that actually can inform the creative process to be so much more productive than if you show up and say, I want a brand that millennials like. [CHUCKLES]
Chris Linnane: It's like making a demo album, really--
Christina Wallace: Yes.
Chris Linnane:--and bring it to a producer.
Christina Wallace: I mean, that's exactly it. And I think it will empower the people who don't feel like they have that muscle themselves to tinker a little bit and then show up with a point of view and be able to be better collaborators. On the analysis side, there's going to be a lot of number crunchers out of work soon because you can't do better. I mean, if you're doing an analysis of a series of steps of math and a visualization output that has been done a million times before, they're going to take your job.
Chris Linnane: Oh, oof.
Christina Wallace: Sorry.
Chris Linnane: Hey, it's not your fault.
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Chris Linnane: Our next clip comes from Sunil Gupta. Professor Gupta teaches digital marketing with HBS Online. He dives into the rise of personalization and its transformative effects on marketing and privacy. He'll break down how companies are navigating this evolving landscape.
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Chris Linnane: How is the rise of personalization and customized marketing experiences changing the way companies should approach digital campaigns?
Sunil Gupta: So I think it's already increasing, and it will increase even more dramatically with the AI and generative AI becoming more common. So you will see a lot more personalization of advertisements, of content, of actual products. As we mentioned, in medicine, they're already talking about precision medicine, where I can have your genome code, and I can design a medication for you, a particular drug formulation for you. Same thing will happen in many other products. So that personalization will increase.
On the flip side, there's a lot of concern about privacy, right? So there is a lot-- EU is already put in some regulations. US is also. Now cookies will become that much more difficult for people to track. Third-party data will be less available. So you will see a lot more effort on company's part to create more and more first-party data, right? So large companies like Google, et cetera have an advantage because they already have the first-party data. So you will see this battle of data much more than ever before. But personalization is already here and more to come.
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Chris Linnane: Now we turn to Felix Oberholzer-Gee, who shares his thoughts on the pitfalls of technology-led thinking. He emphasizes the importance of starting with customer needs rather than being dazzled by the latest technological capabilities. Professor Oberholzer-Gee teaches the outstanding business strategy course at HBS Online.
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Chris Linnane: What are some common mistakes companies make in their strategic thinking around digital transformation?
Felix Oberholzer-Gee: Maybe the most common mistake is to be technology-led so that you think oh, my god, we have LLMs. And as a result, I should be doing-- no, actually never, ever, ever start with technology. Never think about oh, my god, we could do X. We could do Y. We could do Z. That, I think, is almost a recipe for disaster.
Start with jobs to be done. What is it that the customer really wants? What is it that the employee really wants? And then you will see, as you go through the transformation, there are so many technological opportunities that, yes, technology can do X, Y, Z, and it just doesn't really matter to the customer and vice versa.
So give you one personal example. I would love it if speech-to-text would finally work. How is it that we have all of these powerful AI models? And when I dictate-- maybe my accent doesn't really help. But when I dictate, it looks nothing like what I wanted to say. And then the moment I have to correct my text, of course, it's a complete time sink.
I write email in multiple languages. This is 2024. How is it that my email program cannot detect what language I'm writing in? All of these things are really big customer needs. And yet, somehow everybody is fascinated by the little tricks that we can teach a chatbot.
Really? That's your best opportunity? That's your best opportunity if you start with technology because technology can do a set of things that it couldn't do five years ago. If you're thinking about customer needs and what customers really want, many of the things that no one seems to be working on are the things that are really top of our list.
Chris Linnane: Now, do you think it's fair to say that being driven by a technology, an it can do this now-- it almost feels like that's along the-- it's the people or the individuals who couldn't before but now can, that they almost get excited to do something. And they forget about the customer because they're thinking about the thing they can now make. And it feels like that's a recipe for disaster as well because you're more focused on I couldn't, but now I can, rather than does anyone want this in thirst place?
Felix Oberholzer-Gee: Yeah, that's exactly right. So, successful strategy is outside in. We're looking at what customers and employees want, and then we translate that into activities inside the organization. The approach that you just described is inside out.
We have a particular capability. We have a particular technology. And now we're desperately looking around. Is there anyone who wants the metaverse or anything like that? And the answer turns out to be no, not really.
Chris Linnane: It seems like a lot of drivers, potentially from the big hype with AI right now is maybe coming that way where it's I can now make a painting. I couldn't before, but now I can make a painting. But does anyone want that person's painting? Does anyone need that person's painting? So it seems like a lot of energy is being spun around, just being capable of things that they weren't capable of before merely because of technology.
Felix Oberholzer-Gee: Yeah. And sometimes in developing these capabilities, since it's hard to predict what results they will yield, that's still a worthwhile undertaking, right? So we're creating optionality. But then, ultimately, among all the options that technology affords, which one will we invest in? Which ones will we pick? Well, only the ones that correspond to customer demand or ideas about how to make work better work.
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Chris Linnane: Finally, V.G. Narayanan, our professor of financial accounting and one of our founding members at HBS Online, wraps up this special episode by reminding us to focus on our uniquely human skills. He'll share why investing in yourself and learning how to learn are critical in the age of AI.
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V.G. Narayanan: I think we are going into a new era with AI, particularly generative AI. And it's super exciting, but it's also the time to be investing in your skills. And I hope people here will double up and invest in their human capital because that's the only thing that's got a long shelf life. And then the other piece of this is learning how to learn.
And one of the reasons we use a lot of cases in HBS Online is that we take one case, and we say, what did we learn from there? How did we generalize? That is a process that you can repeat, even outside on any of our cases. And it's a skill that you take with you to the real world. So, I think now is the time to be investing in your skill set. And shamelessly, I'll plug our HBS Online courses.
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Chris Linnane: Thank you for listening to this special bonus episode of The Parlor Room. Be sure to check out all of our episodes wherever you get your podcasts. You can also watch video versions of each episode on YouTube. And if you're enjoying the show, please share it with your friends and professional network. Thank you for being a part of the conversation, and we'll see you next time in The Parlor Room.
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