Above: Karim Lakhani discussed GenAI with alumni during his presentation at last fall’s reunion. (Photo by Meg Belanger)

When Professor Karim Lakhani leads discussions about generative artificial intelligence (GenAI), he often begins by asking audience members to stand if they’ve used an AI tool like ChatGPT or DALL-E in the last six months. Typically, 80 to 90 percent of the room rises. Then Lakhani asks who among them believes that GenAI will change their careers or their companies in the next three years. More than two thirds of the crowd usually stays standing. Finally, he asks how many people are currently using this transformative software every day.

When he posed that last question in the Klarman Hall auditorium at the HBS Alumni Reunion last fall, Lakhani got the answer he has come to expect: About 90 percent had indicated usage, about 75 percent anticipated large-scale change, but fewer than 10 percent remained standing when asked about daily usage. “We have a problem,” Lakhani told the gathering. “There’s a big knowing-doing divide.”

Lakhani has made it his mission to help business leaders bridge that divide and remain competitive in a new technological era. The other option is to be left behind. Recall the early days of email, when executives would read printouts of their messages and dictate replies to a secretary, or those who looked at the advent of web browsing and saw the new technology as a toy, not a business opportunity, says Lakhani, the cofounder and chair of the Digital Data Design Institute at Harvard and the coauthor of the book Competing in the Age of AI.

He likens the sometimes-awkward process of embracing these technological shifts to learning to ride a bike. “Steve Jobs talked about the computer as a bicycle for the mind,” says Lakhani, the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration. He views AI in the same way—a widely available invention that enables people to go farther and faster, cognitively. “But when you are learning to ride a bike, it’s initially worse than walking. It’s embarrassing. You are going to fail at it several times. You’re going to get scraped knees and bruised elbows.” Leaders have to persevere, he says. “They have to take the lead in learning how to use these tools so they can understand what it means for their businesses.”

Lakhani has encountered several misconceptions about GenAI in his research. First, he often meets people who either view the still-developing technology as forever flawed—returning written answers riddled with factual errors or images of people with six fingers—or those who view it as “magic pixie dust.” It is neither, he says. The technology—and users’ ability to control it—is constantly improving, but AI will never solve all problems. And among those who are realistic about AI’s future potential, Lakhani often finds they misunderstand how to effectively implement the technology in a business. “Most people think that the effort is going to be 70 percent tech and 30 percent organizational when, in fact, it’s going to be the opposite,” he says. “To really take advantage of these tools, you are going to have to change your organization and make learning investments in AI, both personally and professionally,” Lakhani advises. “You can’t outsource this to others.”

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