What Your CEO Is Reading: AI the Giant Killer; Marketing Moonshots; Platforms and Pipelines; When the Boss Dies

Every week, CIO Journal offers a glimpse into the mind of the CEO, whose view of technology is shaped by stories in management journals, General interest magazines and, of course, in-flight publications. AI may undermine big-company advantages. Machine learning – software that can improve itself without human intervention – may mean trouble for big companies that depend on their heft to outmaneuver smaller upstarts, writes Howard Yu for the Harvard Business Review. And for a sneak preview of where the world is headed, one need not look further than the success story of AlphaGo, an artificial intelligence that beat a champion of the ancient game of Go, something that was previously thought to be impossible. "It is easy to imagine a world where self-taught algorithms will play a much bigger role in coordinating economic transactions; AlphaGo simply shows us what is possible in the near future. With instantaneous adjustment, automatic optimization, and continuous improvement all quietly managed by unsupervised algorithms, the redundancy of production facilities and wastage in the supply chain should become headaches of the past."