Karim Lakhani: When AI Is Smart, When It Is Wrong, and When It Replaces the Team

This event is for Harvard affiliates only, please register here.

When AI Is Smart, When It Is Wrong, and When It Replaces the Team: Evidence from the Frontlines of Knowledge Work

Recent debates about Generative AI often ask whether it will replace human expertise or merely assist it. Evidence suggests this framing is incomplete. In this talk, I synthesize results from two field experiments studying AI use by highly skilled professionals working alone and in teams. The findings reveal a paradox. At the task level, AI sits on a jagged frontier: it accelerates work, improves quality, and boosts confidence on many knowledge tasks, yet systematically induces errors and overreliance on others. At the organizational level, the same systems increasingly behave as cybernetic teammates, allowing individuals to perform at the level of traditional teams, dissolving functional boundaries, and increasing the likelihood of breakthrough ideas—while still failing at judgment and selection. The implication is unsettling: AI can simultaneously make individuals more productive, teams less necessary, and mistakes harder to detect. For academic work, this raises uncomfortable questions about authorship, collaboration, evaluation, and the future division of cognitive labor. Rather than asking whether AI is good or bad for knowledge work, the real challenge is learning how to govern intelligence that is powerful, uneven, and socially embedded.

Karim Lakhani

Karim R. Lakhani is the Dorothy & Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at the Harvard Business School. He is the (co)founder of several Harvard-wide research and educational initiatives centered around the intersection of technological innovation, artificial intelligence (AI) and strategy. He is the co-founder and chair of the Digital, Data & Design (D^3) Institute at Harvard, founder and co-director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard, and the principal investigator of the NASA Tournament Laboratory.

Karim has published over 150 scholarly articles and case studies and is known for his original scholarship on open source software and open innovation and has pioneered the use of field experiments to help solve innovation-related challenges while simultaneously generating rigorous research in partnership with organizations like NASA, Harvard Catalyst, The Boston Consulting Group, Procter & Gamble and The Broad Institute. His digital transformation research investigates the role of analytics and AI in reshaping business and operating models. He co-authored Competing in the Age of AI (2020), an award-winning book published by the Harvard Business Review Press. He has developed six online-courses that have educated thousands of executives on AI strategy, technology-driven transformation, and entrepreneurship. He is the developer of the Data Science and AI for Leaders required MBA course at Harvard Business School.

Karim is an advisor to senior executives at leading companies and startups. He serves as an Academic Partner at Flagship Pioneering, member of the Board of Directors of VideaHealth and Cloudflare. He is the co-founder of Aspire Institute, a non-profit that aims to transform the lives of first-in-family college students world-wide.

Karim was awarded his Ph.D. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He also holds an SM degree in Technology and Policy from MIT, and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University in Canada. Prior to coming to HBS he served as a Lecturer at MIT’s Sloan School of Management. Karim has also worked in sales, marketing and new product development roles at GE Healthcare and was a consultant with The Boston Consulting Group.