If every firm runs its decisions through the same models, where does competitive advantage come from — and is “consensus” a strategy at all?
Every module closes on the other side. Module 10's is the sharpest: the tools built to “support decision-making” are consensus engines. This case fortifies the future-of-AI slide with the quiet primary voices the vendor sources skip.
The deck's future slides argue augmentation, not replacement: AI automates routine tasks so people do creative, strategic work; the change runs across Culture → Operations → Workforce skills (with reskilling and role-based training). The Microsoft Work Trend Index is cited — the real figures are 70% more productive, 68% better quality, 57% more creative (the deck's “90% / 84%” is not what Microsoft published).
The exam wants augmentation + Culture/Operations/Workforce. This case adds the rigorous counter-argument.
The pop “automation paradox” has a 1983 origin: Bainbridge, “Ironies of Automation” — automate the easy parts and you hand humans the hardest part after their skills have lapsed. On augment-vs-replace, reach past the clichés to Zuboff (1988) (automate vs informate), Brynjolfsson (2022) (the “Turing Trap” of building AI to replace), and Autor (2024) (AI could extend expertise). On decisions, Klein (1998) defends expert intuition against “prefer data over hunches”; on oversight, Elish (2019) warns the human-in-the-loop can become a “moral crumple zone,” blamed for the system's failures.
The spine, with receipts: Doshi & Hauser (2024, Science Advances) — AI makes individual work more creative but the collective less diverse; Kleinberg & Raghavan (2021, PNAS) — “algorithmic monoculture” can lower welfare even when the shared model is more accurate; Shumailov et al. (2024, Nature) — “model collapse,” where the rare tails vanish first; and StoryScope (2026 preprint) — AI outputs cluster in a shared structural region while humans spread wide.
Applied to Teece: if everyone senses with the same models, everyone senses the same thing. AI can show you where the consensus is; where your answer needs to be different is still yours to make.
Use the frameworks to pass the quiz — but the move that wins is the one outside the cluster. Consensus is not a strategy.
Correct the deck's Microsoft Work Trend Index figures.
Give the primary origin for two of the “other side” ideas the pop versions borrow.
State the “consensus machine” argument and one study that supports it.