As Commonwealth Bank (CommBank) CEO Matt Comyn delivered the full financial year results in August 2021 over videoconference, it took less than two minutes for him to make his first mention of the organization's Customer Engagement Engine (CEE), the AI-driven customer experience platform. With full cross-channel integration, CEE operated using 450 machine learning models that learned from a total of 157 billion data points. Against the backdrop of a once-in-a century global pandemic, CEE had helped the Group deliver a strong financial performance while also supporting customers with assistance packages designed in response to the coronavirus outbreak. Six years earlier, in 2015, financial services were embarking on a transformation driven by the increased availability and standardization of data and artificial intelligence (AI). Speed, access and price, once key differentiators for attracting and retaining customers, had been commoditized by AI, and new differentiators such as customization and enhanced interactions were expected. Seeking to create value for customers through an efficient, data-driven practice, CommBank leveraged existing channels of operations. Angus Sullivan, Group Executive of Retail Banking, remarked, "How do we, over thousands of interactions, try and generate the same outcomes as from a really in-depth, one-to-one conversation?" The leadership team began to make key investments in data and infrastructure. While some headway had been made, newly appointed Chief Data and Analytics Officer, Andrew McMullan, was brought in to catalyze the process and progress of the leadership's vision for a new customer experience. Success would depend on continued drive from leadership, buy-in from frontline staff, and a reliable team of passionate and knowledgeable data professionals. How did Comyn and McMullan bring their vision to life: to deliver better outcomes through a new approach to customer-centricity? How did they overcome internal resistance, data sharing barriers, and requirements for technical capabilities?

The recent development and diffusion of next-generation digital technologies (NGDTs) such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, big data, 3D printing, and so on are expected to have an immense impact on businesses, innovation, and society. While we know from extant research that a firm's R&D investment, intangible assets, and productivity are factors that influence technology use more generally, to date there is little known about the factors that determine how these emerging tools are used, and by who. Using Probit and OLS modeling on a survey of 12,579 South Korean firms in 2017, we conduct one of the first comprehensive examinations highlighting various firm characteristics that drive NGDT implementation. While much of the literature assesses the use of individual technologies, our research attempts to unveil the extent to which firms implement NGDTs in bundles. Our investigation shows that more than half of the firms that use NGDTs deployed multiple technologies simultaneously. One of the insightful complementarities identified in this research exists amongst technologies that generate, facilitate and demand large sums of data, including big data, IoT, cloud computing and AI. Such technologies also appear important for innovative tools such as 3D printing and robotics.

We use a field experiment in professional sports to compare effects of providing absolute, relative, or both absolute and relative measures in performance reports for employees. Although studies have documented that the provision of these types of measures can benefit performance, theory from economic and accounting literature suggests that it may be optimal for firms to direct employees’ attention to some types of measures by omitting others. In line with this theory, we find that relative performance information alone yields the best performance effects in our setting—that is, that a subset of information (relative performance information) dominates the full information set (absolute and relative performance information together) in boosting performance. In cross-sectional and survey-data analyses, we do not find that restricting the number of measures shown per se benefits performance. Rather, we find that restricting the type of measures shown to convey only relative information increases involvement in peer-performance comparison, benefitting performance. Our findings extend research on weighting of and responses to measures in performance reports.