03 Kellogg Insight Hello, marketing leaders. Data has always played a substantial role in organizations’ ability to understand and serve their customers. What’s changed in recent years, of course, is the scale and methods with which data can be collected, analyzed, and deployed—all in real time and in response to ever-changing customer needs. If your organization isn’t preparing for this new reality, in the words of one of our contributors, it “will be dead sooner than you think.” So it’s no wonder that many leaders are feeling anxious: anxious to improve their analytics and artificial-intelligence capabilities, anxious to purchase the right software or hire the right team, anxious to just get started already. But the critical and multifaceted decisions about where and how a company should focus its analytics efforts cannot be outsourced: not to vendors hawking one-size-fits-most solutions and not even to a company’s own data scientists. Leaders them- selves are ultimately responsible for transforming their organizations. This ebook is for them. Careful readers will note that missing from this collection is the single answer, the silver bullet, the one right path that will always lead to success. Instead, Kellogg and Northwestern faculty, as well as leading practitioners, share their perspectives on how leaders should think about data, analytics, and AI—and offer practical tips and strategies for confidently using these tools to solve actual business problems. The first set of articles in this collection addresses broad questions about what, exactly, leaders need to understand about analytics and AI in order to use them effectively. Kellogg’s Florian Zettelmeyer From the Editor