On June 3, 2024, Michael Jacobides of the London Business School visited the Lab for his talk, “From Use Cases to Strategic Transformation: Expectations for GenAI’s Impact on Sectoral Dynamics, Business Models, and Competitive Advantage.”
The last few months have seen a flurry of research on GenAI’s technical prowess and its remarkable potential, as well as empirical work on its impact on occupations, work, and productivity, with the emphasis being on understanding use cases. But what of its strategic implications? Some research has simply aggregated expected productivity gains, and used more or less plausible assumptions to translate this to impacts on profitability and growth. Yet looking at the history of AI, and technological transformation more broadly, we know that it is profitability distribution that changes more than profitability levels, and that the benefits and costs of new transformative technologies such as GenAI are not equidistributed. Drawing on a large-scale mixed methods approach which leveraged workshops with hundreds of Directors, as well as a detailed survey administered to the members of the UK’s Institute of Directors, London Business School alumni and, separately, portfolio firms of leading Private Equity firms in the winter and spring of 2024, this talk will provide the first comprehensive empirical evidence on the expectations for GenAI’s transformative impact, looking at what senior executives expect. It considers the factors that moderate GenAI’s impact, and provides a guide for GenAI’s anticipated propensity to transform business models, sectors and firms.
Related: “Assessing the expected impact of generative AI on the UK competitive landscape” by Michael G Jacobides and Mingyu Dalbert Ma
Michael G Jacobides, Sir Donald Gordon Professor of Entrepreneurship & Innovation and Professor of Strategy at London Business School, has been ranked as Thinkers50, a top 50 management thinker, since 2019. He has visited Harvard, NYU, Cambridge, Imperial, Bocconi and Wharton, where he obtained his PhD, after studying at Athens, Cambridge and Stanford. His work appears in the top academic journals including such as the Strategic Management Journal and Strategy Science (where his papers on ecosystems and AI are some of their most-read), as well as Organization Science, Research Policy, Academy of Management Journal, and Industrial and Corporate Change where he is a co-Editor. He also publishes in Harvard Business Review, California Management Review (where he won the 2023 Best Paper of the Year Award), Forbes, Fortune and the Financial Times.
He is an Academic Advisor to BCG’s Henderson Institute and Lead Advisor of Evolution Ltd, a boutique advisory focusing on the intersection of strategy, technology and ecosystems. He advises disruptive start-ups and Fortune500 firms alike. His research on industry transformation, value migration and business ecosystems has won awards by the Sloan Foundation, the StrategieForum and CMR. A co-author of WEF’s White Paper on Digital Platforms & Ecosystems and member of the WEF AI Governance Alliance, he has been on its Global Agenda Council and presented in Davos. He is Strategy Advisor (pro bono) of ELLET, Greece’s key NGO on environmental & cultural preservation.
He has worked on policy as a Visiting Scholar at the New York Fed, member of High Level groups for the EU and the Industry Parliament Trust in the UK and serves as the Chief Digital Economy Advisor (pro bono) at the Hellenic Competition Commission. A frequent keynote speaker in events from TEDx to the Global Drucker Forum he works on thought leadership with consultants such as McKinsey, IDEO, Accenture, PwC, Deloitte, Keystone and ECSi, and on strategy with corporates such as SAP, Majid Al Futtaim, Haier, Huawei, Philips, Globe Telecom, MasMovil, Vodafone, Nokia, Enel, Santander, Helvetia, Zurich, CS, BaltCap, Airbus, DeBeers, Lavazza, Burberry, Mowi, MerckSerono, SpringStudio and the NHS.
