Distinguished Professor, Babson College · Fellow, MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy
If one person can be said to have made analytics a boardroom subject, it is Tom Davenport. His 2006 Harvard Business Review article and the 2007 book that followed, Competing on Analytics, gave executives the vocabulary for data as a competitive asset roughly a decade before the current wave. He has been working this territory longer than almost anyone now selling advice about it.
He is President’s Distinguished Professor of Information Technology and Management at Babson College, a research fellow at the MIT Initiative on the Digital Economy since 2011, and a senior advisor to Deloitte’s Chief Data and Analytics Officer programme. He has published 25 books and more than 300 articles, including All-in on AI (2023) on companies that made AI central rather than peripheral.
What distinguishes his work from most AI commentary is that it is built on case research across many organisations rather than one operator’s experience generalised outward. The trade-off is pace: an academic writing books is describing patterns that have already played out, not what shipped last month. Read him for the shape of successful adoption over years; read a practitioner for this quarter’s tooling.
Everything above is drawn from these public sources. Last reviewed 8 August 2026. Links open on the publisher's own site.
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