What Human Psychology Teaches Us About AI Strategy | Prof. Michael Muthukrishna

Michael, you're...

You're quite close to a lot of firms working in this space.

What are you seeing? We get these reports all the time and headlines and all the rest of it.

What are you seeing? What are you feeling on the ground in terms of where interesting things are happening?

Yeah.

there's massive variability, right? You even saw that in the course where some companies have been testing and experimenting and trying things for a long enough time that they're really well ahead of where most other companies are.

And others, you know, there's a sense that, look, AI is important.

Like everybody knows it's important.

So we're going to assign somebody the role of, you know, thinking about how AI is integrated to the organization.

And maybe we'll buy a co-pilot license.

If you're lucky, maybe you'll get access to Claude or something.

But there's not much more than that.

There isn't a kind of cohesive strategy.

And one of the challenges is that the landscape is moving so quickly that That by the time somebody writes a playbook, unless that playbook is in very general terms in terms of how to think about this in the first place.

So, you know, how do we deal with, let's say, the regulatory environment or something like that? It's out of date.

And so it is very much, you know, how does your organization either learn from other organizations that are further along in the process? How do they bring in the kind of training that you received, for example? Or how are they conducting their own kind of experiments where they understand enough about what the potential use cases are, but then because you know your industry better than anyone else does, you know the kind of work that you're doing, you're looking to identify where in your processes AI might actually be able to help some kind of bottlenecks, right? So one mistake I see a lot that companies make is the AI comes first.

Whereas in reality, the best companies realize that AI is in service of the business.

AI is in service of the bottom line.

And what you're looking for is given this is what our business does, where along the pathway? Is it triaging potential customers? Is it once the customers come in, making sure that they have an excellent experience? Is it, you know, is it aftercare of what's going on? Is it your actual product that needs an upgrade? And, you know, when we run these courses as well, like it's wonderful to hear where companies are.

Like, you know, I loved your example of actually we just built a layer so that we could actually understand across the organization all of these things that were previously diffused.

And I was listening to managers personally.

Now I get this report and it's live and I know what's going on.

That's an example of, you know, a company that is experimenting and is at the forefront.

Yeah, we had a few other examples in the course as well, which is great.

I guess thinking about how this plays out and how companies adopt it, I guess one of the things that I found is I've seen some companies setting goals around AI.