Personalized strategy — without the expensive fees! My experience of being impersonated by an AI bot. Rita McGrath
Among the unintended consequences of AI applications built with few guardrails is that conventional views of what is intellectual property are upended — I found out the hard way!
Well, that was a surprise!
An acquaintance contacted me on LinkedIn about something unrelated, and then congratulated me for being forward-thinking enough to work with an AI bot associated with the Board of Innovation. “Say what?” thought I. I know of the Board of Innovation, but I’ve never worked with them or done any joint projects. So I thought I’d check it out.
Sure enough, whoa! Not only was I on their website as a provider of AI enabled strategic advice, but so was Michael Porter, Peter Drucker, Clay Christensen and Sun Tzu. I suppose it is flattering to be included in that company, at least, as my friend Chris Yeh reminds me. To add to the creepiness of it all, the bot was advertised as offering “personalized strategy, without the expensive fees.”
So I thought I’d give it a spin. Worse even than my name and reputation being used, the responses from the bot were awful. I mean, really bad. It confused my work with some work done by McKinsey, provided guidance that I found kind of…
