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Without a retail website as an "intermediary," shoppers can find their desired products more efficiently, since an AI algorithm finds results from across the internet and compiles them in one location, said principal research scientist George Westerman. He questioned the reliability and trustworthiness of the results and who might benefit from them. "Who's influencing the recommendations it gives you?" he said. "It's unclear how neutral AI results are because they've got to make money somehow."

Professor of the practice Zeynep Ton said: "The status quo mindset in leaders is to see labor as a cost to be minimized. Exemplary companies think of employees as drivers of customer satisfaction, profitability and growth."

"Nobody else has the same incentive as Amazon to find the way to automate," said Institute Professor Daron Acemoglu. "Once they work out how to do this profitably, it will spread to others, too." If the plans pan out, "one of the biggest employers in the United States will become a net job destroyer, not a net job creator," Mr. Acemoglu said.

To drive up AI adoption, associate professor Jackson G. Lu recommends that leaders start by steering workers toward tasks that AI clearly handles better than humans and where personalization is unnecessary. Then, he advises gradually incorporating AI into tasks that involve taste, fairness, or empathy — while preserving human oversight and allowing people to customize the results. "Get the fit right," says Lu, "and even AI skeptics become power users."

Five principles make up "dynamic work design," described in the book "There's Got to Be a Better Way," by professor Nelson P. Repenning and senior lecturer Donald Kieffer.

Associate professor Christopher Palmer said defaulting on a car payment is usually a borrower's last resort. Since people often need cars to get to work they're more likely to not pay other bills first. "That could include not paying their mortgages or their rent, in part because it takes a long time to evict someone or to foreclose on a house," he said. That's why he said auto delinquencies are like a canary in the coal mine; another indicator of how squeezed consumers are.