Magazine Fall 2016 Issue Frontiers

Using Artificial Intelligence to Set Information Free

We are on the cusp of a major breakthrough in how organizations collect, analyze, and act on knowledge.

Reid Hoffman Reading Time: 7 min 

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Frontiers

An MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management.
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Editor’s Note: This article is one of a special series of 14 commissioned essays MIT Sloan Management Review is publishing to celebrate the launch of our new Frontiers initiative. Each essay gives the author’s response to this question:

“Within the next five years, how will technology change the practice of management in a way we have not yet witnessed?”

Artificial intelligence is about to transform management from an art into a combination of art and science. Not because we’ll be taking commands from science fiction’s robot overlords, but because specialized AI will allow us to apply data science to our human interactions at work in a way that earlier management theorists like Peter Drucker could only imagine.

We’ve already seen the power of specialized AI in the form of IBM’s Watson, which trounced the best human players at “Jeopardy,” and Google DeepMind’s AlphaGo, which recently defeated one of the world’s top Go players, Lee Sedol, four games to one. These specialized forms of AI can process and manipulate enormous quantities of data at a rate our biological brains can’t match. Therein lies the applicability to management: Within the next five years, I expect that forward-thinking organizations will be using specialized forms of AI to build a complex and comprehensive corporate “knowledge graph.”

Just as a social graph represents the interconnection of relationships in an online social network, the knowledge graph will represent the interconnection of all the data and communications within your company. Specialized AI will be ubiquitous throughout the organization, indexing every document, folder, and file. But AI won’t stop there. AI will also be sitting in the middle of the communication stream, collecting all of the work products, from emails to files shared to chat messages. AI will be able to draw the connection between when you save a proposal, share it with a colleague, and discuss it through corporate messaging. This may sound a bit Big Brother-ish, but the result will be to give knowledge workers new and powerful tools for collecting, understanding, and acting on information.

Reid Hoffman executive chairman co-founder LinkedIn
Reid Hoffman, executive chairman and co-founder of LinkedIn

Specialized AI will even help us improve that scourge of productivity, the meeting. Meetings will be recorded, transcribed, and archived in a knowledge repository.

Topics

Frontiers

An MIT SMR initiative exploring how technology is reshaping the practice of management.
More in this series

About the Author

Reid Hoffman is executive chairman and cofounder of LinkedIn Corp.

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Comments (4)
Prasad Ajinkya
Whereas the use of AI at present has been in the more obvious areas such as marketing, I like the way you have guided the discussion on AI being an enabler of the new Knowledge based organizations. 

The recording, transcribed and archived part is already being done in the world out there. 

One of the major challenges that cross functional teams face is the ability to build on top of the existing collective intelligence. A knowledge graph which is accessible will help in the discovery of existing knowledge, and also in the creation of new ones. 

Opening up this AI capability and making it available for major organizations without creating a conflict of interest is another challenge. OpenAI is a right step in that direction.
Debby Kruzic
I have been in the document management field for 25 years.  Definitely agree that AI is the next stage for managing documents and information.  I have some ideas for a solution that would use AI.  Any suggestions on who to connect with to start formulating some ideas and building a team?  Thank you.
New Profile
One of the most important thing for a company is to increase its growth exponentially and to achieve this one has to manage the various resources available in the company to maximize its efficiency as far as possible. Your article is worth reading as it provides the various steps to enhance the management skills.
e.constantinides
Great article Reid, I like a lot the "Knowledge Graph" concept and fully agree that AI will be the next big challenge and management frontier. In our Digital Marketing courses in the University of Twente (NL) we introduce the students to IBM Watson as marketing management tool and the interest of the students is great. 
Hope to hear more about this and see businesses taking the matter seriously
Efthymios