New for Fall 2020

Professor Narayandas is currently the Senior Associate Dean of HBS External Relations and Chairman of Harvard Business Publishing, having served as Senior Associate Dean of Executive Education from 2012-2016. Prof. Narayandas taught several popular EC courses in the past including Business Marketing, which he designed and created, as well as a section of Entrepreneurial Finance. In recent years, he has focused on teaching popular EE courses in strategic marketing, sales management and service excellence.

Arijit Sengupta is the Founder and CEO at Aible. Aible is an award winning Enterprise AI solution that transforms how companies make strategic decisions, act optimally, react to changes, and align across the organization using AI as an enabler for collaboration at scale. Arijit is the former Founder and CEO of BeyondCore, a market-leading Automated Analytics solution that is now a key part of Salesforce Einstein. Arijit has guest lectured at Stanford and other universities; spoken at conferences in a dozen countries; and was written about in The World Is Flat 3.0, New York Times, San Jose Mercury News, Harvard Business Review, The Economist, and other leading publications. Arijit held leadership positions at several Big Data, Cloud Computing and eBusiness industry associations and previously worked at Salesforce, Oracle, Microsoft, and Yankee Group. He has been granted eighteen patents in the domains of advanced analytics, machine learning, Business Process as a Service, business process improvement, operational risk, privacy and information security. Arijit holds an MBA with Distinction from the Harvard Business School and Bachelor degrees with Distinction in Computer Science and Economics from Stanford University.

1.         Why AI is Failing Businesses, Jan 8, 2020, Fast Company 
2.         How AI will guide our daily lives — and we won't know it, Dec 20, 2019, San Francisco Chronicle 
3.         The Life-Threatening Consequences of Overhyping AI, Mar 6, 2019, Wired 

Jonathan Wray is the Co-Founder of Aible. Aible is an award winning Enterprise AI solution that transforms how companies make strategic decisions, act optimally, react to changes, and align across the organization using AI as an enabler for collaboration at scale. Prior to founding Aible, Jonathan led Customer Success and Product Management for Einstein Discovery, formerly BeyondCore, a market-leading Automated Analytics solution at Salesforce.com. Jonathan has guest lectured at the University of California Berkeley Haas School of Business and given keynote speeches at several conferences including the Disney Data and Analytics Conference. Jonathan has delivered impact throughout his career by leveraging automation and advanced quantitative techniques developed during his early career in factory automation which he later adapted and built upon to deliver unprecedented business impact. Jonathan held leadership and strategy positions at several global corporations including Bosch, Danaher, and Fortive. Jonathan holds an MBA with Honors from the University of Chicago Booth School of Business and a Bachelor's degree with Honors in Mechanical Engineering Technology from Purdue University.

Content and Organization

Please note that this is a new course and most of the course materials are still in development. If you decide to enroll in this course, you will be a partner in every aspect of the course, from development to delivery. The course is about applying AI the right way to optimize the market-facing functions of a firm, i.e., marketing, sales and support.

In the first third of the course (8-9 sessions) we will analyze and discuss traditional HBS cases – to establish a set of core concepts/toolkits around the integration of traditional marketing, sales and support functions – what we call as market-facing functions. Whether in b2c or b2b settings, the digital world enables firms to be integrated in their customer management effort – from acquisition (demand generation) to retention (demand fulfillment and relationship management) – a redefinition of the traditional roles played by marketing, sales and support functions of a firm.

In the second third of the course (9 sessions), you will analyze data from the field in the form of "use cases" using the Aible Business software in preparation for each session. It will be a "hands-on" learning experience on how to optimize some aspect of the market-facing functions learned in the first third of the course while also learning how to design and implement AI projects successfully from a business perspective by avoiding common traps in AI – data leakage is one example, accuracy versus impact would be another. You will work in pairs on the data analysis for each use case and will be required to submit a report of your analysis/results prior to the class discussion. Only the top 5 of your graded reports will count towards your overall grade.

The final third of the course will be a team-based field (research/consulting) project wherein you will work in teams of 3/4 with sponsor firms. We are recruiting firms that are currently using (or planning to use) AI in their market-facing functions to better serve their clients, for example, a leading sell-side research firm that is trying to use AI to enhance and optimize its client management functions. We are also recruiting vendor firms that offer AI solutions to help their clients optimize and enhance some aspect of their market-facing functions. For example, a start-up that provides AI-based solutions for use by a client's marketing and field salesforce organizations to coordinate management of the sales funnel from lead generation/qualification through to cross-selling services over time. You will be expected to submit a final report of your findings that will account for 35 percent of the overall grade. Our hope is that some of these project reports (with the sponsor firms' approvals) will lead to the development of course materials for use in future iterations of the course.