Tom Davenport

Based on his Wall Street Journal bestselling book of the same name, this keynote identifies what separates organizations that are generating measurable business value from AI from the much larger group that is running experiments without results. Davenport draws on primary research across hundreds of companies to map the strategic, cultural, and operational choices that define genuine AI leaders — and gives senior audiences a practical framework for moving from AI ambition to AI advantage. This is not a technology briefing. It is a business strategy session grounded in the most rigorous research available.

AI is no longer just answering questions. It is taking actions. Agentic AI systems can plan, execute, and adapt across complex workflows with minimal human supervision, and they are moving from research labs into enterprise operations faster than most organizations are prepared for. Davenport, co-author of Agentic Artificial Intelligence (2025), gives senior audiences the clearest available framework for understanding what agentic systems actually do, which business processes are most immediately affected, what governance and risk considerations are non-negotiable, and how to build the organizational capabilities needed to deploy these systems safely and profitably.

In most industries, data, analytics, and artificial intelligence have taken the guesswork out of business strategy. So why haven’t these tools revolutionized health care? In this presentation, Tom Davenport – distinguished professor of IT management at Babson College and cofounder of the International Institute for Analytics – reviews the potential for more intelligent health care, and the structural barriers preventing a full health care makeover. He describes the silos that prevent data sharing, the slow progress of AI adoption, and the differences in objectives among stakeholders. With optimism about new AI capabilities and information management roles – like Chief Information Officer, Chief Data Officer, and Chief Analytics and AI Officer – and a keen understanding of internal change management issues, he offers health care leaders practical solutions for making more informed decisions through full data integration.

Nearly two decades after his landmark HBR article, the gap between organizations that use data strategically and those that merely collect it has widened dramatically. In this updated keynote, Davenport revisits the original analytical competitor framework and traces how it has evolved through the eras of big data, machine learning, and generative AI. He gives leadership teams a candid assessment of where most organizations still fall short, what the current leaders are doing differently, and what specific investments in data infrastructure, talent, and culture are most likely to generate durable competitive advantage.

The arrival of large language models has generated more executive confusion than almost any technology since the internet. In this keynote, Davenport applies three decades of research and direct organizational experience to cut through the noise: what generative AI can genuinely do for business operations, where it consistently underperforms expectations, how it differs from analytical AI and when to use each, what the real implementation challenges are, and how to build an organizational approach to generative AI that generates value rather than just headlines. For any leadership team that needs to make informed decisions about generative AI investment, this is the most rigorous and practically useful briefing available.