Key takeaways from researching and writing with my supervisor

During a routine dissertation update meeting with my supervisor, Prof. Bikramjit Ray Chaudhuri, the current buzz around artificial intelligence (AI) prompted me to ask, “Sir, are you considering a research project related to AI?”. His thoughtful response surprised me: “Not yet– I am still undecided about whether AI is going to be a serious disruptor, or it will end up becoming merely a productivity-enhancing tool”.

Our brief exchange sparked a rich 15-20-minute conversation and led us to conclude that a deeper exploration was needed to understand whether AI can be a real differentiator for a business or destined to be imitation fodder.

Over the next few weeks, we reviewed a wide range of sources–news articles, business magazines, journals and insights from academic research to sharpen our understanding. Our findings were both exhilarating and cautionary:

Positives:

AI offers incredible promise for value creation/enhancement and productivity gains to businesses; it can optimise decision making, augment products, automate and streamline operations, and enhance customer experience.

Risks:

However, once AI becomes ubiquitous, its easy adoption will raise the risk of imitation, turning any competitive advantage into a commodity.

The real value lies in how AI is adopted, beyond just choosing and training the best AI model in the market. Sustainable differentiation requires integrating AI into a business’s core strategy, building AI-driven capabilities, and evolving new ways of human capital development, aligning with newer AI capabilities.

To learn more about each of these aspects, one can read the full article here, authored by Prof. Bikramjit Ray Chauduri and me, published in CXOtoday.com.

What did I gain from it?

1. Knowledge of AI’s strategic impact
   It enriched our knowledge about how AI is transforming traditional firms, and superficial adoption might not be enough for future success.
2. Research in AI and organisation
   It exposed me to various hot research topics being explored in this domain. This may inform and help crystallise my future research paths in the domain.
3. Lastly, it helped strengthen my ‘writing’, an indispensable skill for a scholar. As famous author William Zinsser said, “Writing is how we think our way into a discipline, organise our thoughts about it and generate new ideas.”

Crafting this article deepened my knowledge in this field and will surely help spark ideas about future research projects.

The author of this blog Mahesh Kumar is a research scholar in the Strategy area from the FPM 2020 batch. His work explores how organisations adapt and evolve within ecosystems, with a focus on platform research and strategic innovation. With prior industry experience in business analysis and strategy in the textiles sector, Mahesh brings a rich practitioner’s lens to his academic journey.