ODC Webinar
Scaling Human Capital: Codified Selves and Value Creation
and Appropriation
Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury
Lumry Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School
--- 23rd January 2025, Thursday at 9am EST/3pm CET ---
Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have significantly enhanced organizations’ ability to capture and replicate the knowledge, skills, abilities, and other characteristics of their employees. We introduce the concept of Codified Selves (CoS), micro-level AI models that are trained on individual-level data, are attributable or identifiable to individuals, and encapsulate not only the explicit knowledge but also the thinking heuristics and communication styles of individuals within organizations. These unique attributes of CoS challenge traditional notions of human capital ownership by enabling firm utilization of an individual’s capabilities without their physical presence and mitigating losses of human capital due to employee mobility. We investigate the resulting implications for value creation and appropriation from human capital in organizations. Our analytical framework predicts that while CoS can create value by scaling human capital, they can also induce a lock-in effect of binding individuals to firms, and that these effects will be contingent on nature of employee human capital. Together, our framework and findings extend the notion of AI from being a macro-level system built on largely anonymized data across multiple individuals to the micro level where AI mimics and potentially represents an individual in spatially and temporally distant contexts.
About the Speaker:
Prithwiraj (Raj) Choudhury is the Lumry Family Associate Professor at the Harvard Business School. His research is focused on studying the Future of Work, especially the changing Geography of Work, including the productivity effects of geographic mobility of workers, causes of geographic immobility, and productivity effects of remote work practices such as ‘Work from anywhere’ and ‘All-remote’. He is an Associate Editor at Management Science and was included in the 2023 Forbes Future of Work-50 list. Raj’s research has been published in Management Science, Organization Science, Strategic Management Journal, Research Policy, The Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Development Economics, Review of Financial Studies, Harvard Business Review, and has been cited in BBC, Bloomberg Businessweek, New York Times, The Wall Street Journal, Washington Post, Forbes, WIRED, Inc., Times of India among other outlets. He earned his Doctorate from Harvard and has Degrees from the Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Management. Prior to academia, he worked at McKinsey & Company, Microsoft, and IBM.
Registration closes 22nd Jan, 2025 at 9 am (eastern time)
Hope you will be able to join us!
