Case Studies of AI in Business

AI capability commoditises faster than the advantage built on it forms, so the firm that creates the value is often not the firm that keeps it. Advantage lives in a loop that accumulates only while the system is operated and decays when it is neglected. Systems fail probabilistically, and agentic systems act before anyone reviews the action, which makes the boundary between human and machine authority a strategy question. The stack concentrates in a few model, cloud and compute providers, so every sourcing decision is also a dependency decision.

Durable advantage comes from cognitive capital, meaning the situated judgement an organisation accumulates through overrides, escalations, adjudications and outcomes. Any competitor can license the same model. None of them can license the judgement a firm has built by running that model against its own work for two years. The most durable returns come from boring AI, meaning advanced technology pointed at routine, high frequency work, and the showcase projects that attract budget and headlines rarely produce them. Through 2025 the large majority of enterprise AI initiatives stalled in pilot purgatory, somewhere between a convincing demonstration and a system that carries real work, and the course is an account of why that happens.

Classical strategy enters at the point of use. Rumelt’s strategy kernel, Porter’s Five Forces, transaction cost economics and the resource based view are applied to specific AI decisions and stress tested where AI economics strain their assumptions. Each team carries one assigned firm through all 10 lectures, producing five decision canvases that accumulate into a strategy addressed to the board of a listed firm or to the investors of a private one, and defended in the final session.

The course is built for students who can already build AI systems and who will shortly be asked to decide which ones deserve to exist.

Running question. You can build it, so should it be built, who captures what is created, and what makes it last after it works?