AI Index Report 2026
AI Index Steering Committee
An annual overview of AI research, adoption, economics, policy, and public opinion.
Business takeaway: Use it to frame an AI business case and trace adoption figures to their underlying sources.
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Educational Materials and Training
Explore AI through a friendly story, then put the ideas to work with practical training.
Featured learning video · 9 min 45 sec
Little Max's AI Village
Join Little Max and Ferris for a tour of the ideas behind artificial intelligence. Learn how prompts, context, models, training, and human review fit together—one stop at a time.
Download MP4Complete 480p download · about 26 MB
Explore the chapters
Choose a topic to jump to that part of the video.
Downloadable learning guide
AI Primer
A practical reference for understanding AI and applying it to business work. Explore how the components fit together, turn requirements into reusable prompts, choose tools, and check the results.
Includes the CLEAR method, prompt templates, business guardrails, model-selection guidance, and quick and master glossaries.
31 pages · PDF · about 1.7 MB
Research & further reading
Generative AI in business
Explore seven studies on prompting, teamwork, productivity, and implementation. These summaries are adapted from the supplied annotated reading list; consult the original studies for methods, exact findings, and limitations.
The Cybernetic Teammate
Fabrizio Dell’Acqua and colleagues
A field experiment explores how AI changes individual performance, teamwork, and collaboration across specialties.
Business takeaway: Consider how AI can help specialists bring other perspectives into product and process decisions.
Prompting Science Reports 1–4
Lennart Meincke, Ethan Mollick, Lilach Mollick, Dan Shapiro, and collaborators
Four reports test prompt formulas, step-by-step instructions, incentives, and expert personas.
Business takeaway: Build clear task specifications, provide relevant context, and evaluate outputs against real work.
Read the reports: 1 · Prompt formulas · 2 · Chain of thought · 3 · Incentives · 4 · Expert personas
The GenAI Divide
Project NANDA, MIT Media Lab
A preliminary report examines why enterprise AI pilots struggle to produce measurable operating value.
Business takeaway: Tie each pilot to a specific workflow, accountable owner, and measured outcome. Its reported failure rate is sample-specific and should not be generalized.
Generative AI at Work
Erik Brynjolfsson, Danielle Li, and Lindsey Raymond
A workplace study examines an AI assistant used by customer-support agents, with larger gains among less experienced staff.
Business takeaway: Explore AI support for high-volume work, onboarding, and sharing experienced employees’ knowledge.
Navigating the Jagged Technological Frontier
Fabrizio Dell’Acqua and colleagues
A consulting experiment finds that AI’s usefulness varies sharply between tasks, including tasks that appear similar.
Business takeaway: Test the actual workflow and retain human checks where AI is unreliable.
Productivity Effects of Generative AI
Shakked Noy and Whitney Zhang
An experiment examines the speed and quality of short professional writing tasks completed with ChatGPT.
Business takeaway: Start with bounded writing tasks and check quality. Results do not establish performance on long projects or brand consistency.
Practical companion · Villanova Falvey Library
Prompt engineering guide
Sara Marx’s practical guide covers clear instructions, audience, tone, format, and iteration. Use it as a prompting primer alongside the research above.
Bring the learning to work
Practical training for your team
Move from understanding AI to using it in a real workflow. MTG workshops connect business needs with clear requirements, reusable instructions, and ways to check the results.
Applied generative AI training
Explore executive briefings, team workshops, and customized programs built around your processes.