HAI Weekly Seminar with Harikesh Nair
Digital Advertising: The Golden Age of Experiments
Get the latest news, advances in research, policy work, and education program updates from HAI in your inbox weekly.
Sign Up For Latest News
Digital Advertising: The Golden Age of Experiments
How do AI agents influence knowledge work? This paper finds that agents shift worker effort from implementation to supervision, which especially benefits verifiable work and expert workers. I use data from the coding platform Cursor to study agents in software production.
.png&w=1920&q=100)
How do AI agents influence knowledge work? This paper finds that agents shift worker effort from implementation to supervision, which especially benefits verifiable work and expert workers. I use data from the coding platform Cursor to study agents in software production.
What does digital inclusion look like in the age of AI? Over 6,000 of the world’s 7,000-plus living languages remain digitally disadvantaged.

What does digital inclusion look like in the age of AI? Over 6,000 of the world’s 7,000-plus living languages remain digitally disadvantaged.
AI+Science: Accelerating Discovery is an interdisciplinary conference bringing together researchers across physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and more to examine how AI is reshaping scientific discovery.

AI+Science: Accelerating Discovery is an interdisciplinary conference bringing together researchers across physics, mathematics, chemistry, biology, neuroscience, and more to examine how AI is reshaping scientific discovery.
Running experiments is part and parcel of science and have lead to dramatic breakthroughs in fields such as biology, medicine and physics. Compared to these, business experiments – focused on outcomes and issues of interest to firms – are a relatively newer phenomenon but are now becoming increasingly prevalent. In some areas, such as digital advertising, experimentation has become a core feature of how business is run, so much so that the current decade in computational advertising represents a golden age of experimentation in the social sciences. This talk describes how online experimentation works in modern ad-systems, and how advertising experiments differ significantly from their natural science counterparts. I also discuss practical challenges in building experimental systems within technology-driven platforms and in driving adoption of experimentation-driven tools amongst advertisers and marketers using examples from the Chinese and US markets.
