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In a study by professor Jackson Lu and co-authors, researchers followed 471 employees at a Fortune 100 company. Some were randomly assigned to complete nine weeks of debate training. A year and a half later, those employees were 12% more likely to have been promoted into leadership roles. Learning to debate isn't just about arguing. It's about learning how to share your perspective diplomatically and assertively, a skill that is valued in many American workplaces, Lu told Business Insider.

Many companies spending significantly on AI are actually increasing headcount, according to a study by research affiliate Lawrence Schmidt and co-authors. The research also found that AI use can contribute to growth in certain roles because workers focus on higher-value tasks. Increased AI use was linked to both employment and sales growth.

In his new book, "Disposable Workers: The Transformation of Employment," Professor Emeritus Paul Osterman estimates that about 17% of U.S. employees are marginal workers — roughly one in six employees. They are technically part of an organization but have little connection to its traditional career structure. "We're not becoming a gig economy; we're becoming a disposable one," he said.

Principal research scientist Neil Thompson wrote: "AI can increasingly provide information. Technical professionals will continue to provide something harder to automate: judgment, context, and the ability to help people turn knowledge into decisions. When this happens, decision friction decreases."

American target-date funds held $4.8 trillion at the end of 2025, a fifth more than a year earlier. Distinguished senior lecturer Robert Pozen has spent this year arguing that conventional advice is too timid for savers who are comfortably off. Pozen's complaint is that the glidepath turns cautious for savers who have no need of the money. Most advisors counsel a 60-40 split between shares and bonds, whereas the wealthier sort would do better holding 90% in a cheap index fund and 10% in a money market fund.

Professor Catherine Wolfram said: "We tend to associate climate change with higher heat, but the El Niño phenomenon also brings flooding to some places and droughts to other places. If you're a farmer in India or Africa and you experience a flood one year that wipes out your crop, it probably makes you less able to sustain a heatwave that comes the next year."

What happens to a company at the moment when the AI ​​revolution takes off? Senior lecturer Paul Cheek's new book, "No One Works Here: How AI-Driven Enterprises Are Raising the Bar for Business, Leadership, and Competition," addresses this question. The book's foreword was written by Henry Ford III (MBA 2010).

The gap between what humans can understand, audit, and support and what machines can produce may grow faster than the human capacity for supervision. This gap has a name. In "Some Simple Economics of AGI," a working paper by research scientist Christian Catalini and co-authors, researchers call it the "Measurability Gap" and argue that verification bandwidth — the finite human capacity to validate results, audit behavior, and account for what has been produced — may become the constraint that defines the true value of AI at scale.

Associate dean Christopher Knittel and visiting professor Gilbert E Metcalf wrote: "If the goal is to make drivers pay for the roads they use, the right unit of taxation is not vehicle ownership. It is miles driven. A household that drives an electric vehicle 3,000 miles a year does not impose the same road-use burden as one that drives 20,000 miles a year. A flat annual fee treats them as if they do. That is not a user fee. It is a registration surcharge."

"A charter makes it easier for you to support customers and provide new services," said research scientist Christian Catalini. He said World Liberty Financial represents part of a backlog of crypto companies seeking to operate as banks and now getting approved under the Trump administration. "Being regulated as a bank is not a joke. I think in the long run this is going to be a net benefit for society," he said.