Tech at the Edge: Evaluating the Potential of Emerging Tools

Evaluating the Potential of Emerging Tools

To leverage the disruptive power of new technologies, leaders must keep an eye on their maturity and be ready to implement them before slower-moving competitors. But the key for would-be early adopters is to disregard hype and bring a critical mindset to planning which emerging tools to incorporate into their organizations' tech road maps.

That's not easy when investors and the media jump on the bandwagon of the supposed next big thing, and cries of "Don't get left behind!" drown out clear-eyed discussion of value-generating use cases. There's plenty of such noise around Web3, but we focus on one element that deserves business leaders' attention now: decentralized digital credentials.

Mary Lacity, Erran Carmel, Amber Grace Young, and Tamara Roth explain how these blockchain-based systems work and take an in-depth look at several pilot projects that demonstrate their potential value but point to looming interoperability challenges and the need for standards.

For organizations on the forefront of implementing Al-based decision support models, we offer insight into how to dissect developers' performance claims and determine the quality of Al tools' recommendations. Sarah Lebovitz, Hila Lifshitz-Assaf, and Natalia Levina observed how teams in health care evaluated new Al tools by digging deep into the ground truth on which their Al models were built and determining whether decision quality met current professional standards. Their guidance can help managers who are considering similar tools to ask the right questions of vendors and developers.