The Executive Briefings for the Summer 2019 issue of MIT SMR give a snapshot of the issue’s close look at the challenges, culture shifts, and opportunities that adopting AI will bring to businesses. Plus: How to make M&A successful; does management style change with age?

Executives intent on exploiting AI to enhance processes or products tend to focus on having a strategy for AI. But creating strategy with AI can matter as much or even more. In a machine-learning era, enterprise strategy is defined by the KPIs that leaders choose to optimize —the measures organizations use to create value, accountability, and competitive advantage. AI can help determine what KPIs are measured, how they are measured, and how best to prioritize them.

Striking the right balance between competence and credibility is essential to digital leaders’ success, but it depends on what a company expects its CDO to do. While external candidates can bring critical digital competence and experience to organizations seeking a better digital footing, they may struggle to build the necessary credibility for organizational change.

Many leaders lack the skills and mindset to thrive in the digital economy, and mindset gaps create blind spots. It’s difficult to be a great leader when you don’t know what you don’t know.

Hoping a jack-of-all-trades can lead your organization’s digital transition is unrealistic. We found four distinct types of successful digital executives who can best provide vision and purpose for digital. Crucially, each type has unique strengths and performs best in different contexts.

Prioritizing process improvement, redefining performance, and committing to digitization, DBS Bank revitalized its performance management strategy and turned itself into one of the world’s most successful global digital banks.

In the digital age, the competitive landscape can be transformed in the blink of an eye. Companies can use weak digital signals to help redefine their offerings and the scale and scope of how they compete. Companies that can’t do this in a timely manner put themselves at a competitive disadvantage because they must invest in additional resources to catch up.

Few business websites offer features that simplify transactions, create deep customer relationships, and drive sales growth. To succeed, they need to personalize and customize their online selling process through high-performance technology and customer-centered business models.

Converging technologies are realigning how organizations operate in an increasingly connected world. Companies that take the time to understand and invest in crucial technologies will benefit from lower barriers to entry in new markets and sectors and greater ease in developing and scaling new capabilities in the next generation of business.

Digital newcomers who understand their consumers can change the economic status quo. This has been true in China and its banking industry in recent years. The financial arms of Alibaba have used powerful consumer experience insights from their digital ecosystems — and altered the nature of competition for incumbents in the process.

Examining skill sets and mind-sets will help leaders understand what it means to be a leader in the digital economy. This will include requirements such as changing mastery, executing excellence, nurturing relationships, and, notably, building a culture of radical trust.

Platform companies continue to surprise and challenge conventional approaches to creating value. The 2018 MIT Platform Strategy Summit brought together innovative leaders who are playing a major role in the changing digital economy. Learn from their experience with five major principles for creating new value with platforms.

In a webinar featuring Google Cloud’s Quentin Hardy, MIT SMR looks at historical precedents of disruptive technologies and how they remade society — and work — in the past. Are we on the brink of the next big technological disruption to business, labor, and education thanks to Big Data and Cloud technologies? And how do managers prepare themselves, their teams, and their organizations for the changes to come?

With the rise of blockchain and adoption of cryptocurrencies, companies across different industries can benefit from the increased trust and transparency these emerging technologies provide. Most executives recognize the need to prioritize blockchain as part of their business strategy, but the question of how to adopt and reskill can be daunting.

Organizations need to rotate quickly from the core business that has sustained them in the past toward new opportunities. The key to turning that ambition into financial reality? Setting the state for change by mastering three critical preconditions.

The most popular articles from the MIT SMR archive reflect the depth and range of management challenges our readers face in areas such as innovation, leadership, strategy, and technology. Authors of these “must reads” include MIT Sloan faculty Nelson Repenning and Donald Sull, plus Clayton Christensen, Albert Segars, Michael Schrage, Sam Ransbotham, David Kiron, Philipp Gerbert, and Martin Reeves.

Political struggles for control and decision-making often result in blocking or slowing down progress on digital initiatives. In this webinar, digital strategist Jane McConnell discusses her research findings on digital maturity and shares her guidelines for preventing politics from upending digital initiatives.

When it comes to transformation, many organizations struggle with a dilemma of digital growth happening at the expense of customer satisfaction. By moving to a platform-based approach, companies can align tech investments and new features with the customer experience.

In the eyes of many leaders, artificial intelligence and cognitive technologies are the most disruptive forces on the horizon. But most organizations don’t have a strategy to address them.

The accelerating pace of technology, fueled by hyperspecialization, digitization, and the ability to control these new environments, has been quietly ushering in a new economy set to disrupt every industry — the coherence economy.