What are the biggest challenges to AI implementation? MIT SMR readers share their thoughts in a recent online discussion.

As AI finds its way into more and more facets of modern life, we need clear systems for keeping it in check. Leaders should consider how it will affect the ways people think and interact with each other — and, more worrisome, how it will affect civilization.

The combined power of social, mobile, analytics, and cloud technologies has now become part of the technology foundation for organizations. In the looming “post-digital” era, adopting these technologies isn’t going to offer a competitive advantage — it will be a necessity for doing business.

Forming a partnership between brands can help companies reap rewards — but what happens when there are more than two partners? The answer depends on the goals and the industry; each must find its own “sweet spot” of how many collaborators is just enough, but not too much, to match consumer expectations.

How should organizations organize for and implement artificial intelligence?

Counterpoints takes on two pressing questions in the sports analytics field: the issue of information overload and whether there is such a thing as too much data, and a very different — but related — issue: Biometrics. We’ll go to the mat over whether professional athletes will be willing to share their personal biometric data in real time.

In the B2B platform economy, companies are looking beyond just selling products and are building platforms that enable others — customers, suppliers, and partners — to create value.

It’s tempting to look at high-profile business ecosystems and assume that the model is a reliable formula for success. In fact, many ecosystems never earn a significant market share, and only about 15% dominate their markets over time. An analysis shows that most share a common life cycle, with several critical windows along the way. For management, the key is understanding these windows and adjusting the company’s strategy over time to meet the unique requirements of each.

Developing new rules for the digital age is proving uncomfortable for people at every organizational level. Digitization (the transformation for operational excellence) requires top-down leadership principles with centralized accountabilities, while success with digital business (the transformation toward rapid innovation) requires local empowerment with distributed accountabilities. These are basically opposite approaches to accountability, but they’re both necessary.

Cyberattacks are increasing in frequency, sophistication, and impact. Defending against them requires a new perspective on the attacks and the attackers. By applying a value chain lens to the problem, we can better understand the dark web as an ecosystem in which well-orchestrated attacks are assembled by entrepreneurs and supported by well-organized service offerings. This casts new light on the dark web and suggests more effective and proactive responses to cyberattacks.

Current thinking is that the 7-foot center who used to dominate the NBA is a thing of the past. But a new analytics focus on defense shows that might not be the case. The Philadelphia 76ers’ data scientist, Ivana Saric, explains why.

Good corporate culture can turbocharge performance, while a bad culture can wreak havoc on a company’s reputation and results. When companies strike the right balance on culture, they can align behavior with corporate strategy while allowing employees flexibility to exercise judgment and initiative.

This month’s MIT SMR Strategy Forum poll looks at the space economy, which some estimate could reach $1 trillion in 20 years. We asked our panel of strategy experts to evaluate whether commercial activity in space will see a boon in the next decade, or if this bet on the final frontier is off the mark.

To survive and thrive in today’s market, a healthy corporate culture is more important than ever. The MIT SMR/Glassdoor Culture 500 uses machine learning and human expertise to analyze culture using a data set of 1.2 million employee reviews on Glassdoor. This interactive tool offers previously untapped insights about the organizational culture of over 500 of the world’s leading companies and provides leaders with new tools for benchmarking culture in their own organizations.

Technology leaders are not shy about pushing the boundaries of their industries, and sometimes they go further — challenging the prevailing rules of society at large. The eagerness of entrepreneurs to test limits isn’t surprising to Tarun Khanna, the Jorge Paulo Lemann Professor at Harvard Business School, who has spent more than two decades studying how business strategies play out in emerging markets.

The worlds of venture capitalism and corporate investing are not always easy to combine. Research has identified three simple rules, focused on adapting traditional VC rules, creating effective incentives, and building communication, that may increase corporate venture capital success.

Which teams make it to the college football playoffs isn’t as random as it sometimes seems, says University of Wisconsin-Madison professor Laura Albert. In this week’s Counterpoints podcast, we look at how Albert uses analytics to predict the brackets and how the football playoff selections compare to that other big college tournament, March Madness.

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.

An infographic explores distinctive characteristics of innovation in digitally maturing organizations.

This month’s MIT SMR Strategy Forum poll looks at the global race to deploy 5G — next-generation internet connectivity — which has several countries pitted against each other. We asked our panel of strategy experts to examine the competitive scenario if China were to achieve a 5G rollout first.