John Sviokla
John Sviokla is a strategist, educator, and co-founder of GAI Insights who helps leaders build hybrid organizations where humans and AI work as one system. An Executive Fellow at Harvard Business School, he focuses on “owning your intelligence” by protecting cognitive capital, personalizing work with targeted assistants, and scaling agent-based automation with clear governance and KPIs. A longtime advisor to Fortune-class firms, Sviokla bridges economics, technology, and operations to turn AI from experimentation into measurable enterprise performance.
The Competitive Advantage No One Is Protecting
Episode Summary
Most companies obsess over financial capital, human talent, and digital infrastructure. But few realize their biggest competitive advantage—cognitive capital—is under threat. John Sviokla argues that a company’s true moat is its cognitive capital, the know-how of how you decide, operate, and win. In this episode he shows how to protect that asset while you scale AI in the places that matter. You will hear how targeted assistants reshape day-to-day work, why managed autonomy keeps humans in charge, and how to run agents like a real workforce with named owners, audit logs, access controls, and KPIs such as cycle time, time to decision, cost to serve, and revenue per employee. Sviokla walks through a practical maturity model that moves teams from ad hoc experiments to enterprise lift. He details the data core every agent needs, including clean system-of-record data, event logs, and feedback signals, and explains how to wire orchestration so agents hand off tasks, escalate edge cases, and learn from outcomes. He outlines governance your CISO will sign, from contract language that prevents model training on your data, to policy on prompts and outputs, to red team testing and rollback plans. The result is a clear operating playbook. Own your intelligence. Personalize work where it pays. Automate with guardrails. Measure lift in business terms. If you want to out-learn and out-deliver competitors, this episode shows how to build a hybrid organization that compounds advantage.