Is AI the Right Tool to Solve That Problem?

by Paolo Cervini, Chiara Farronato, Pushmeet Kohli, and Marshall W. Van Alstyne, Harvard Business Review, December 2024

Artificial Intelligence has witnessed a remarkable surge, captivating researchers, product teams, and end users alike with its transformative potential. But despite its recent popularity, AI is only successful in solving problems with very specific features. In this article, we offer guidance to help organizations identify the right problems to address with AI, to find solutions when the context does not perfectly align with what AI is best at solving, and, after potential projects have overcome those hurdles, to choose which ones can offer the largest benefits for business or for broader society.

Paolo Cervini is vice president, co-lead of Capgemini Invent’s Management Lab, and Thinkers50 Radar Class of 2023. Previously, Paolo was content coordinator at HBR Italia.

Chiara Farronato is the Glenn and Mary Jane Creamer Associate Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School and co-principal investigator at the Platform Lab at Harvard’s Digital Design Institute (D^3). She is also a fellow at the National Bureau of Economic Research (NBER) and the Center for Economic Policy Research (CEPR).

Pushmeet Kohli is vice president of AI for Science at Google DeepMind, leading efforts including AlphaFold, a state-of-the-art AI system for predicting the 3D structure of proteins. Pushmeet has published in the fields of machine learning, computer vision, game theory and human computer interaction. Previously, Pushmeet was director of research at the Cognition group at Microsoft Research.

Marshall W. Van Alstyne is the Allen & Kelli Questrom Professor and Digital Business Institute Fellow at Boston University, Digital Fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, and Visiting Scholar Harvard Berkman-Klein Center, recognized by Thinkers 50 as one of the top management thinkers globally.

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