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Blog Posts by Tom Davenport

One of the fastest-growing areas of artificial intelligence—at least if that term is defined broadly—is “robotic process automation,” a set of capabilities for the automation of digital tasks. RPA, as…
In a previous piece I wrote about an MIT conference suggesting that fully autonomous vehicles are not just around the corner. In the short run, then, we’ll be riding in…
What do we call the collection of technologies that make up what we used to call “artificial intelligence?” This conundrum reminds me of a Raymond Carver short story (and book)…
There is little doubt that the United States is the most active market for cognitive technologies, but it is hardly the only one. There is also considerable interest in the…
For the many years that I have been researching IT, there has always been a clear distinction between certain types of applications. One, for example, distinguished “B to B” (business…
It’s been 10 years since Jeanne Harris and I published our book, Competing on Analytics, and we’ve just finished updating it for early-fall (2017) re-publication. We realized during this process…
I have been thinking about some of the changes over the last decade in analytics, coinciding with the revised and updated release of my book with Jeanne Harris, Competing on…
Analytics and big data have penetrated most large organizations by now, and are helping to improve many internal decisions. But they can also have a major impact on the decisions…
Among my least lucrative, but most interesting jobs is being a “digital fellow” at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy. There are often interesting developments happening there on the…