HBR IdeaCast · Harvard Business Review

Strategy Summit 2026: Who’s Going to Succeed with AI?

April 2, 2026·30 min·2 clips

Andy McAfee proposes a three-part playbook for AI success when nobody knows anything.

The setup is formal, with a summit-room feel. Alison Beard frames the episode as the last installment from HBR's Strategy Summit 2026 series and brings in Andy McAfee from MIT. The conversation stays in management territory, but it has a sharper edge than a standard AI pep talk. McAfee's main point is that AI reinvention should not come from people sitting around a whiteboard trying to design the future of work in advance. He wants leaders to support the push, then go find the people already experimenting. In his telling, those early users are grabbing new tools, testing them against actual problems, and coming up with better ways to get work done. Leadership still matters. It has to notice those people, learn from them, and spread the practices that survive contact with real work. Beard then asks the question sitting underneath the whole episode. If AI is already near the top of strategy agendas, is the commitment based on evidence, or is it mostly faith? McAfee accepts the techno-optimist label, but he does not treat AI as a belief system. He says economists have criteria for spotting general purpose technologies, and he puts AI in the same broad category as the steam engine and the internal combustion engine. Big comparison. The useful part is what it does to the management question: the issue is not whether to dabble, but how to organize when the upside is large and the outcome is still uncertain. McAfee's answer is practical. Commit seriously, then look for the reinvention already happening inside the company.

As heard by us

A practical AI strategy session on why culture, hierarchy, and bottom-up experimentation may decide who pulls ahead.

AI strategy is framed here as an organizational question, not just a software rollout. Andy McAfee, MIT principal research scientist and co-founder and co-director of the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy, argues that the companies with the best chance of using AI well will…

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