Our September 2025 members’ meeting featured Laura Northridge of Harvard Business Review / Harvard Business School Publishing and Andrew Jesse of Harvard Business School. They discussed how they’ve been building new product offerings and experiences with generative AI — their approach and the issues they had to overcome.
Northridge and Jeske shared a detailed case study on developing an AI-powered tool, the Strategy Lab, designed to help business leaders create, assess, and communicate their strategies. The team, composed of product managers, designers, and a data scientist, leveraged a variety of generative AI tools throughout the product development lifecycle. They began with rapid prototyping using no-code and low-code platforms, such as Bolt, and relied on AI assistants like ChatGPT for market research, interview script generation, and even coding support. This approach enabled them to quickly iterate on ideas, gather user feedback, and refine their concepts before moving to more robust, data-driven prototypes.
A significant focus of the discussion was on the challenges and best practices of integrating AI into real-world products. The team emphasized the importance of grounding AI outputs in trusted, proprietary data to maintain brand credibility and user trust—especially critical for an institution like Harvard. They described their process for ensuring accuracy, including faculty reviews, rubrics for evaluating AI responses, and a fallback cascade of different AI models to balance speed, reliability, and quality. Security and privacy were also top priorities, with measures such as multi-factor authentication and secure data storage built into the product from the outset. Throughout the project, HBP highlighted the value of using AI not just in the end product, but as a tool to accelerate and enhance the entire innovation process.
• • •
Laura Northridge is the Senior Director of the AI Innovation Lab at Harvard Business Publishing, where she drives the AI product strategy and creates new products and services for the Harvard Business Review consumer market, B2B learning experiences for the global Fortune 1000 companies, and provides Business School learning resources for higher education audiences.
Andrew Jeske is a Digital Product Manager at Harvard Business School, managing the development of AI-powered tools that support and enrich MBA learning experiences. His recent work includes building generative AI support for two flagship courses: Public Entrepreneurship and Data Science & AI for Leaders—the latter being HBS’s first AI-first course, teaching students how to conduct statistical analysis in a no-code environment and apply data science fundamentals to leadership challenges.
