Lessons from Corporate Nudging

Mixing Behavioral Science, Economics and Psychology.    Its likely that this concept will influence AI methods as implemented in assistant technologies.  But there are lots of issues in such methods.  Utimately its a test of how machines manage people.   Important challenges hinted at here.

Lessons from the front line of corporate nudging  By Anna Güntner, Konstantin Lucks, and Julia Sperling-Magro in McKinsey

Executives setting up a behavioral-science unit should start by challenging themselves with six questions.

If you’re serious about setting up a behavioral-science team—or a nudge unit, as we’ll more colloquially refer to it in this article—you need to ask yourself some tough questions, such as what it should do, where it should sit, how you’ll know it’s succeeding, and whether you’re ready for the ethical tensions it may raise.

Lessons from the front line of corporate nudging

Subtle interventions to help people make better decisions are hardly new. Since the 1950s, behavioral scientists, using a mix of economics and psychology, have studied human irrationality and devised ways both to improve the choices made by consumers and influence how employees react in the workplace. Increasingly, over the past two decades, companies have used the insights of behavioral science to reduce bias in boardrooms, improve strategic decision making, provide benefits for customers, enhance the effectiveness of marketing campaigns, and avoid making bad bets on major acquisitions or investments.  ... "