How can small businesses benefit from artificial intelligence? A student works at the Colosseum, the largest emulator in the world, at the Innovation Campus in Burlington, Massachusetts at Northeastern. Photo by Matthew Modoono/Northeastern University
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By now, most people who run small and midsize businesses know that they ought to take advantage of artificial intelligence to make their companies competitive in the digital age. But many don’t know how to go about it.
To meet this demand, Northeastern, which invested $50 million in a new artificial intelligence research
institute last year, will lead a new Massachusetts program,
The COVID-19 pandemic and the associated shutdown of economic activity, first in China, then in parts of Europe and the United States, has drawn stark attention to the consequences of long supply chains that snake around the globe. In the health care sector, disruption in the production or shipment of protective masks from China and of pharmaceutical feedstocks from India underscores the way production networks can transmit shocks in one nation to firms and consumers in many others. Recent developments highlight a much more general point: as supply chains lengthen, the set of shocks whether due to natural disasters, political forces, health conditions, or other sources that can impact the production of final goods becomes much larger. Global supply chains can be a source of risk, but the appropriate risk analysis and policy response requires understanding the nature of that risk and the role of policy levers in addressing it.