Clinical Trials For AI? with Prof. Karim Lakhani

24 Oct 2025 · 34 min
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This is a Morning Brew Markets Daily podcast (Oct 24) featuring an interview with Harvard Business School Professor Karim Lakhani about his work running randomized "clinical trials" of AI inside firms. Lakhani summarizes controlled studies with Procter & Gamble and Boston Consulting Group showing AI can act as a teammate—boosting productivity and expertise and improving worker sentiment—but with a "jagged frontier": large gains (≈40%) on creative tasks and performance drops (≈20%) on earlier spreadsheet/analytical tasks in an earlier generation of tools. He discusses Ant Group as an "AI-native" example (scale with few employees), deployment challenges (a J-curve, workflow change, and change management), ethical and market incentives for training data, and which incumbents are actively transforming (examples: JP Morgan, P&G).

Questions this episode answers

October 24 (episode referenced as Friday, October 24).

Boston Consulting Group (BCG) and Procter & Gamble (P&G).

About 800 consultants.

Performance improved by about 40% on creative/new-product-development tasks.

Performance dropped by about 20% on spreadsheet/analytical tasks (in the earlier-generation tools used in that study).

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