Competing in the Age of AI

by Marco Iansiti and Karim R. Lakhani

IN 2019, JUST FIVE YEARS after the Ant Financial Services Group was launched, the number of consumers using its services passed the one billion mark. Spun out of Alibaba, Ant Financial uses artificial intelligence and data from Alipay—its core mobile-payments platform—to run an extraordinary variety of businesses, including consumer lending, money market funds, wealth management, health insurance, credit-rating services, and even an online game that encourages people to reduce their carbon footprint. The company serves more than 10 times as many customers as the largest U.S. banks—with less than one-tenth the number of employees. At its last round of funding, in 2018, it had a ...

Get HBR's 10 Must Reads on Leading Digital Transformation (with bonus article "How Apple Is Organized for Innovation" by Joel M. Podolny and Morten T. Hansen) now with the O’Reilly learning platform.

O’Reilly members experience books, live events, courses curated by job role, and more from O’Reilly and nearly 200 top publishers.