AI and Strategic Decision-Making - AIDEC
Unit Director: Alfonso Gambardella
The AI and Strategic Decision-Making Unit (AIDEC) at the BAFFI Research Centre of Bocconi University is dedicated to advancing knowledge of how artificial intelligence is transforming strategic decision-making in firms. The mission of the unit is to conduct cutting-edge research addressing two questions: How does artificial intelligence change the way managers and entrepreneurs make strategic decisions under uncertainty? And how can AI be designed and deployed to improve the quality of these decisions and, ultimately, firm performance? The unit approaches both questions through the lens of the scientific approach to decision-making: decision-makers perform better when they behave like scientists, framing problems, articulating causal theories of value, evaluating alternatives probabilistically, and testing their beliefs through experimentation before committing resources. Beyond how AI shapes decisions, the unit studies how firms apply AI in their operations and everyday activities, as well as the regulatory dimension of these developments and its growing economic and constitutional significance. The research agenda of the unit is organized around six complementary areas:
AI and the microfoundations of strategic decisions. How managers and entrepreneurs use AI to frame strategic problems, build causal theories, evaluate alternatives, and decide under uncertainty, and under what conditions AI improves or degrades strategic judgment.
Agentic AI in organizations. How autonomous and semi-autonomous AI agents change the allocation of decision rights, delegation, organizational structure, and the boundaries of the firm.
The scientific approach to decision-making at scale. Field and laboratory experiments on theory-based decision-making, extended to AI-assisted settings, with implications for entrepreneurship, corporate strategy, and innovation.
Methods, measurement, and data. New empirical methods for studying decision-making, including text-as-data approaches, large-scale datasets on the decisions and actions of firms, and AI-driven measurement of abstract constructs such as theories, beliefs, and decision processes.
AI applications in the life of firms. How firms adopt, deploy, and integrate AI across their operations, processes, products, and business models, and how these applications affect productivity, organization, and performance, beyond their effect on individual decisions.
The regulatory dimension of AI. How the emerging regulation of AI shapes the strategies and operations of firms, and how the diffusion of AI raises questions whose impacts are increasingly not only economic but also constitutional and societal.