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Bringing artificial intelligence to business management

Nature Machine Intelligence volume 4, pages 611–613 (2022)Cite this article

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Artificial intelligence (AI) can support managers by effectively delegating management decisions to AI. There are, however, many organizational and technical hurdles that need to be overcome, and we offer a first step on this journey by unpacking the core factors that may hinder or foster effective decision delegation to AI.

Despite widespread optimism and some early success, the applications of AI in management remain limited to a relatively small subset of — mostly routine — decisions. The key to understanding the promise and challenges for AI in management is to focus on the problem of delegation of decisions by managers to AI1,2,3,4. Consider the problem of delegation in mergers and acquisitions by companies, where decisions may imply legal and ethical concerns that are best deliberated by managers5,6. Here, AI will provide input to human decision-making while the manager will remain in the ‘driver seat’. In effect, AI substitutes individual decisions or tasks (rather than entire positions), thereby complementing rather than substituting management decisions2,4. Moreover, both humans and AI have relative strengths, where humans excel in intuition, empathy, broad judgment and complex reasoning. Hence, for companies to benefit from AI, the focus needs to shift towards promoting a full or partial delegation of decisions that augment managers.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Institute of AI in Management, LMU Munich School of Management, LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

    Stefan Feuerriegel

  2. Department of Management, Technology, and Economics, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Yash Raj Shrestha & Georg von Krogh

  3. Faculty of Business and Economics (HEC), University of Lausanne, Lausanne, Switzerland

    Yash Raj Shrestha

  4. Institute for Computing Platforms, Department of Computer Science, ETH Zurich, Zurich, Switzerland

    Ce Zhang

Authors
  1. Stefan Feuerriegel
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  2. Yash Raj Shrestha
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  3. Georg von Krogh
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  4. Ce Zhang
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Georg von Krogh.

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Feuerriegel, S., Shrestha, Y.R., von Krogh, G. et al. Bringing artificial intelligence to business management. Nat Mach Intell 4, 611–613 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-022-00512-5

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