Article

Noah Barsky

This issue of Amplify looks at how leaders can best balance digital era stewardship and growth. That future hinges on strong management in the next five years. Each article addresses the universal question that challenges boards and C-suites: will leaders shape the future, or allow it to define them?

Article

Eystein Thanisch, Greg Smith, Michael Papadopoulos

Arthur D. Little’s Eystein Thanisch, Greg Smith, and Michael Papadopoulos address talent management and career planning by asking, “Someone using AI will replace you, but who will replace them?” Their intriguing piece explores which everyday tasks can be augmented or automated by AI. They extend the discussion by examining skills needed across professions and encourage workplaces to reflect on and assess talent needs. Imagining future workflow, technology needs, and employee composition is an overdue dialogue — especially as AI capabilities accelerate.

Article

San Murugesan

Cutter Expert San Murugesan spotlights AI’s worrisome “dark side.” Specifically, he outlines a wide array of concerns related to AI’s inherent complexity, scalability, reliability, and ethical issues. More importantly, Murugesan sets forth a trust framework that can underpin responsible and effective AI design, development, implementation, and application.

Advisor

Michael Eiden, Philippe Monnot, Armand Rotaru

This Advisor explores how knowledge graphs (KGs) help connect and extract value from big data. While widely adopted by tech giants, KGs shouldn’t replace relational databases outright; the choice depends on factors like data exploration speed and scalability needs. KGs enable visualizing connections for deeper insights, uncover hidden interdependencies through algorithms, and allow flexible scaling by starting small and expanding over time.

Article

Jeremy Blain

Jeremy Blain offers a thought-provoking demarcation of digital detachment and determination. He identifies the pitfalls of widespread tepid and failed transformation projects in recent years and trumpets the imperative for credible leadership that forges meaningful digital era readiness. The article equips senior executives with the insights they need to ask meaningful questions and take substantive actions to ready their organizations for the decade ahead.

Article

Noah Barsky

In his article, Noah Barsky explores the criticality of financial insight and responsibility. Timely and timeless financial acumen is as crucial as ever in the digital era, as it can quickly reveal which enterprises are, in reality, only technologies in search of a sustainable business model. Despite the fluid and fleeting lexicon of business buzzwords, leaders of well-run organizations honor fiscal stewardship, deliver competitive returns, and communicate with clarity and candor.

Advisor

Amit Vikram, Vikram Agarwal

Part II of this Advisor series on change management focuses on the critical role of a reimagined change management office (CMO) in driving successful digital transformations. It examines the CMO’s solution catalog, levels of program engagement, and essential enablers for effective change management, offering actionable insights to enhance organizational adaptability and transformation outcomes.

Advisor

Vijaya Lakshmi, Jacqueline Corbett

This Advisor explores how AI tools are transforming sustainable agriculture by integrating with traditional farming practices. Through three case studies, it highlights how farms are leveraging AI for disease detection, weather prediction, and crop management while addressing challenges such as infrastructure gaps and community skepticism. By blending technology with local knowledge, these farms demonstrate pathways to achieving climate-resilient and sustainable agricultural outcomes.

Advisor

Myles Suer

In this Advisor, CIOs highlight the importance of IT projects that, while lacking direct business impact, deliver critical strategic benefits such as resource optimization, technical debt reduction, and infrastructure support. They discuss the challenges of managing ROI in environments constrained by limited resources, emphasizing the CIO’s role in balancing cost-efficiency with human impact and explore the often-overlooked accountability of reallocating resources to higher-impact projects, reinforcing the broader value IT contributes to organizational goals.

Article

Armand Smits

Armand Smits, an assistant professor of organizational change and design at Radboud University, the Netherlands, tackles one of the most pressing issues in digital sustainability: the rising energy and environmental cost of data centers. Digital sustainability approaches and AI rely on large amounts of data that are increasing exponentially and must be stored and processed in data centers. Smits provides a deep dive into the Climate Neutral Data Centre Pact (CNDCP) to help managers and policymakers understand how to limit the environmental impact of data centers.

Article

Angela Greco, Andrea Kerstens

Angela Greco, assistant professor of innovation management at TU Delft, and Andrea Kerstens, a TNO scientist and PhD candidate in innovation management at TU Delft, draw on their experience with Syn.ikia, an EU-funded Innovation Living Lab for positive-energy building districts that leverage energy efficiency and renewable energy sources. Digital innovations like digital twins have been essential to unlocking positive-energy districts. For instance, digital twins that combine physical models of buildings and AI models of user behavior allow building districts to predict and optimize usage of excess solar energy. Their article presents three lessons learned from the project.

Article

Lukas Falcke

This issue of Amplify, the second in a two-part series, offers another set of insightful articles from leading researchers and practitioners working on digital innovation for climate action. The authors reiterate the core message of this Amplify series: digital innovation can accelerate climate action if managed correctly. Of course, it will lead us directly to climate disaster if used irresponsibly. Applying the carefully crafted frameworks presented in this double issue can help us avoid the latter and enable the former.

Article

Hamdy Abdelaty, Jakob Pohlisch

Led by Hamdy Abdelaty, a high-profile team of researchers at the Lusastia Energy Innovation Center (EIZ) at Brandenburg University of Technology, Cottbus-Senftenberg, Germany, shares insights about the role of digital innovation in facilitating energy innovation. The article focuses on Lusatia, a German region historically reliant on lignite (brown coal) for energy, and its ongoing transformation under Germany’s ambitious Energiewende policy, which aims for climate neutrality by 2045.

Article

Diaa Shalghin, Winfried Heusler

Diaa Shalghin, an emerging thought leader on building information management (BIM) in Germany and currently senior BIM manager at DEGES, teams up with Winfried Heusler of the Detmold School of Design, Germany, previously senior VP of engineering and building excellence at Schüco. The authors apply a digitally enabled, digital-first framework to explore the opportunity of enhancing lifecycle assessment through digital innovation and present three takeaways: (1) implement a digital-first sustainability strategy for improved environmental simulation and modeling through BIM; (2) leverage digitally enabled sustainability for environmental data collection and analysis through the Internet of Things; and (3) combine digitally enabled and digital-first sustainability strategies for continuous optimization through AI.

Article

Brian van Laar, Angela Greco, Hilde Remøy, Vincent Gruis, Mohammad Hamida

Drawing from their rich expertise in real estate, housing management, urban planning, and innovation, Brian van Laar, Angela Greco, Hilde Remøy, Vincent Gruis, and Mohammad Hamida explore the concept of adaptive reuse, which involves repurposing buildings to extend their lifespan and can drastically cut emissions in the built environment. However, implementing and scaling adaptive reuse is challenging. The decision-making process is often top-down and fails to capture relevant voices and make compromises acceptable to all stakeholders. AI might come to the rescue as it enables new visualization tools to unite stakeholders.

Advisor

Bill Fox

This Advisor emphasizes that true leadership transcends titles and is rooted in authenticity and conscious awareness. The inner leadership journey shifts from ego-driven action to being, unlocking profound personal and organizational transformation essential for today’s leaders.

Advisor

Curt Hall

This Advisor builds on our previous discussion about AI’s transformative role in wildlife conservation and research. It delves into the development of AI applications and highlights key AI models such as CNNs, SVMs, and random forests. These technologies enhance efforts in species identification, habitat monitoring, and biodiversity tracking, driving global collaboration and more effective conservation strategies.

Advisor

Daniel Rees, Roderick Thomas, Victoria Bates, Gareth Davies

Healthcare and pharma are embracing a data revolution, powered by wearables, AI, and genomics/precision medicine. These technologies drive efficiency, precision, and innovation, but their true value depends on aligning outcomes with stakeholder needs. This Advisor explores how data-driven decision-making, value-based metrics, and emerging technologies are transforming healthcare services.

Advisor

Amit Vikram, Vikram Agarwal

In Part I of this three-part Advisor series on change management, we lay out the challenges associated with change in digital transformations and explore an innovative CMO solution to those challenges that leverages data analytics and GenAI.

Advisor

Ryan Bouldin, Elizabeth Levy

This Advisor suggests a new framework for incorporating corporate responsibility into product design; its categories include equity and justice, transparency, health and safety impacts, circularity, and climate and ecosystem impacts. This method results in an inclusive design process that embodies corporate responsibility.