Thomas H. Davenport

Confidence 0.75 · 2 sources · last confirmed 2026-07-15

Babson College / MIT researcher and long-time writer on organizations and technology; a long-time human-in-the-loop advocate. Recurs in the wiki across two independent 2026 MIT Sloan CIO Symposium-adjacent sources with a consistent throughline: the organization, not the technology, is where AI’s value is won or lost.

Wiki contributions

• 2026-06-11-mit-smr-agentic-ai-what-leaders-wish-they-knew-sooner — warns that human oversight of agentic AI is becoming performative: agents work far faster than humans, review becomes “very cursory,” people are “pestered to approve things rapidly,” and “a lot of humans are not going to want to be auditors of what AI is doing.” The wiki’s sharpest statement that rubber-stamp oversight is a failure mode, not a safeguard.
• 2026-07-10-when-ai-becomes-common-organizational-capability-becomes-the-advantage-ep-16 — quoted at length (via a Substack article Irving Wladawsky-Berger drafts a blog post around) making the episode’s title argument: “What matters isn’t the technology… the ability of organizations to deploy the technology effectively and get value from it matters more than the technology.” Companies must redesign work, management, and decision-making to capture AI’s potential — redesign work that “takes time.”

Why he is an entity (promotion note)

Promoted on his second wiki source-page appearance (per §Author-entity promotion): first cited dangling (“very strong future-promotion candidate”) on the 2026-06-11 MIT SMR compilation page, promoted here on the 2026-07-15 batch ingest of the weekly-podcast episode.