Tom Davenport

Distinguished Professor, Babson College · 1 appearance on the record.

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academicauthoranalyst@tdav ↗LinkedIn ↗tomdavenport.com ↗Wikipedia ↗

He is an authority on analytics, process innovation, and artificial intelligence in business, co-authoring the seminal book Competing on Analytics. He also co-founded the International Institute for Analytics and has authored over 20 books examining workplace automation and AI augmentation.

9statements → 7claims → 1claims resolved → 3/5average certainty → 2.67/5average debate potential →

0 supported 0 partly supported 1 contradicted 6 not checkable as stated how the 7 claims stand · each chip opens the sources

5 predictions · 2 assertions · 1 opinion · 1 insight · every statement was checked. The predictions and assertions are the 7 claims: statements the public record can support or contradict. 1 is resolved, and 6 name no date, number or outcome precise enough to check. Everything else (opinions, insights, what ifs, disclosures) can never be settled by the record, so it carries no assessment.

The record, in short

What the tape says about how Tom argues and how the claims held up. Everything they said, and everything said about them, is in the tabs below.

Their most notable contradicted claim

Assertion Contradicted

Davenport: Basic income experiment recipients mostly spend extra time watching TV

“But in the experiments thus far, it appears that instead of doing, you know, highly meaningful activities, people just watch more TV.”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:29 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

How they sound: not measured why? →

We measure speaking style by listening to the audio itself, and a fair number needs at least 2,000 words from one person on tape we have measured. There is too little of Tom Davenport on measured tape to publish a rate. This says nothing about how they speak.

What they said9 Episodes1

Everything Tom Davenport said on the a16z Podcast that made the record, most notable first. Filter by type, assessment or year in the ledger →

Assertion Contradicted

Davenport: Basic income experiment recipients mostly spend extra time watching TV

“But in the experiments thus far, it appears that instead of doing, you know, highly meaningful activities, people just watch more TV.”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:29 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Tom Davenport: Humans will prefer human-created art and humor over AI

“I think at some point there will probably be just a human preference for human created art and humor and so on, just because it's human.”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 15:43 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Davenport: AI will struggle to read human psychological cues like bluffing

“The whole thing about looking in your opponent's eyes and figuring out whether they're bluffing or not. I think that's going to be tough for machine to do for a while.”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 17:19 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Opinion

Davenport: Society should offer guaranteed work rather than basic income

“Because of this belief in the importance of work for, you know, meaning and life satisfaction, we'd argue for guaranteed work, which would be compensated rather than guaranteed income alone.”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 21:01 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Insight

Davenport: Pure corporate automation triggers a race to the bottom in margins

“Pursuing automation tends to be kind of a race to the bottom in many ways. It sort of lowers everybody's cost, but it also lowers everybody's margins, and everybody ends up doing kind of similar, not so innovative things”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 24:11 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Davenport: Augmentation is the most likely path for AI in work

“I think that augmentation-oriented future we think is by far the most likely one for how AI travels through the occupational world.”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 5:02 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Davenport: Almost every tech vendor will add cognitive AI capabilities

“You know, big companies like IBM are hiring thousands of people to do this, and I think there's every reason to expect that as these technologies take hold, almost every vendor will have some level of cognitive capabilities, and a lot of people will need to be…”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 10:33 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Prediction Not checkable as stated

Davenport: Automation will bring outsourced corporate work back in-house

“Well, we believe that organizations will continue to Exist and in fact may bring more of their work back in house than they have had over the past couple of decades that automation may take back a fair amount of the work that was distributed through outsourcin…”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 23:40 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Assertion Not checkable as stated

Davenport: AI interest and corporate adoption hit an all-time high

“As you suggest, we've gone through various cycles in this space, and this is probably the most spring-like spring we've ever had in the sense of interest in the technology, the number of firms that are adopting it.”

Tom Davenport Jan 2, 2019 ▶ 0:54 a16z Podcast | Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)

Appearances (1)

Episode	Date	Speaking time
a16z Podcast \| Automation, Jobs, & the Future of Work (and Income)	Jan 2, 2019	8m

Tom Davenport

The record, in short

Their most notable contradicted claim

How they sound: not measured why? →

Appearances (1)

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