Canadian authors Ajay Agrawal, Joshua Gans, and Avi Goldfarb offer their expertise on subjects of strategic management, entrepreneurship, innovation, artificial intelligence and healthcare as educators at the Rotman School of Management in Toronto, as well as important contributions in other areas of note. In this excellent book they bland their input to create one of the most accessible, informative, and reliably accurate accounts of the impact of artificial intelligence on individuals, companies, and organizations. As they state in the Preface addressing their prior tome on AI, ‘ We realized that we must consider not only the economics of the technology itself but also the systems in which the technology operates. We must understand the economic forces that led to the rapid adoption of AIs for automated fraud detection in banking and product recommendation in e-commerce on the one hand, but the slow adoption of AIs for automated underwriting in insurance and drug discovery in pharmaceuticals on the other…. We shifted our focus from exploring neural networks to exploring human cognition (how we make decisions), social behavior (why people in some industries are keen to embrace AI quickly while others are resistant), production systems (how some decisions depend on others), and industry structures (how we’ve hidden certain decisions to shield ourselves from uncertainty).’ 

 

While everyone has heard of Artificial Intelligence (AI) in the news, social media, television and movies - the ‘topic du jour’ in our lives today - few resources match the accessible, credible, well presented examination of this technology as this excellent book relates. The authors’ skills as educators make this fascinating tome a primary guidebook for insight into the effect AI has on economics at present and the possible permutations and potentials of AI in the future. In other words, read this book and understand AI - scholarly and accessible - finally! Highly recommended.