Are You Turning Your Cognitive Scrap Into Cognitive Capital?
AI helps progressively structure complex tasks and smart executives use their cognitive scrap to build cognitive capital.
Read on Forbes →AI · Private equity · Cognitive capital
How owners turn AI into lasting value.
I advise senior executives and investors on cognitive capital: the processes, algorithms and data that firms codify to create value. HBS Executive Fellow. Co-founder of GAI Insights.
I taught Harvard Business School’s first course on artificial intelligence in 1986.
HBS Executive FellowGAI Insights co-founderForbes contributorHBR author since 1988
Where the work has been done
- Harvard Business SchoolExecutive Fellow. Taught its first AI course in 1986
- Diamond Technology PartnersVice Chairman. Director of The Exchange, a technology think tank
- PwCUS Chief Marketing Officer. Global Head of Thought Leadership
- ForbesColumnist on AI and cognitive capital
- Harvard Business ReviewAuthor since 1988
- TEDxBostonSpeaker
- GAI WorldHost, annual enterprise AI conference
- InfuSystemBoard member
The idea
Cognitive capital
Capital is what accumulates, compounds and multiplies other capital. Codified cognition does all three. Firms that capture it systematically will out-learn the ones that only cut costs.
- Tacit to explicit. Make what experts know usable by everyone.
- Scale beyond human limits. Standardize knowledge too vast for people to hold.
- New patterns. Let machines find signal no one has seen.
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AI transformation means building Cognitive Capital, but EBITDA inhibits investment. Smart leaders will create a capital budget for cognitive capital too.
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Firms that embed cognitive capital in their products are more engineering heavy and flatter. All firms should ask what value they can embed with AI into the product.
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Book
The Self-Made Billionaire Effect
How extreme producers create massive value. With Mitch Cohen (2015).
About the book → · Find it on Amazon →Speaking and advisory
Board briefings, executive sessions and keynotes on AI and cognitive capital, plus advisory work with owners, operating executives and investors.
GAI Insights
The firm behind the research
GAI Insights is the AI research and education firm I co-founded. It trains executive teams, assesses AI fluency with the AI Fluency Index and hosts GAI World, the annual enterprise AI conference in Boston.