AthenaHQ, a startup that helps brands monitor, protect, and optimize their visibility across conversational AI engines like ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini was founded in 2025. The company, co-founded by Andrew Yan, built a platform that enables major consumer brands, B2B software companies, and marketing agencies to track their share of voice, correct factual errors in AI responses, and manage their reputation across generative answer engines.

In the case, “AthenaHQ: Building Brands for AI Search,” Yan faces a call with a global automaker after its newest vehicle has quietly vanished from chatbot recommendations. He must evaluate the platform’s expansion as he confronts core industry dilemmas: how AI disintermediates traditional marketing, who should own generative engine optimization (GEO) inside an organization, and how to prove value on an unattributable channel.

In this episode, Harvard Business School associate professor Julian De Freitas and AthenaHQ co-founder and CEO Andrew Yan join host Brian Kenny to discuss the case, exploring how marketers are navigating the new world of GEO, the so-called “dark funnel” of customer engagement, and the need for brand managers to optimize for brand sentiment and accuracy not just search rankings.

How do you scale innovation in a fragmented system you don’t fully control? That is the challenge Highland Electric Fleets faced as it worked to replace diesel school buses with electric vehicles across the United States. While Highland provided financing, infrastructure, and fleet operations, success depended on external partners, including manufacturers, utilities, and districts. Delays and disruptions forced the company to stay nimble and deliver under pressure.

In 2024, Mass General Brigham, the largest health system in Massachusetts, piloted an AI-powered ambient note-taking program among a subset of clinicians to address increasing rates of staff burnout and turnover —  largely driven by the administrative burden of clinical documentation in the electronic health records (EHR). The pilot program aimed to test AI tools which used natural language processing to record, transcribe, and summarize physician-patient encounters, reducing time spent on documentation and allowing physicians to focus more on patient care. Early results showed promising reductions in clinician burnout, intention to leave, and increased physician efficiency. But concerns about the technology, including the generation of inaccurate notes with errors or hallucinations, made physicians resistant to learn and adopt it into their workflows.

Harvard Business School Associate Professor Susanna Gallani and host Brian Kenny discuss the challenges leadership at the health care organization anticipated as they considered scaling the AI technology responsibly in the case: The AI Scribe: Enhancing Physician Presence and Curbing Burnout at Mass General Brigham.

In early 2025, Thomas Graham, CEO of Metaphysic, a leading AI generative video company confronted fundamental questions about who should control digital identity in a world where AI could perfectly recreate human likeness. Founded in 2021, Metaphysic first rose to fame through viral deepfake videos. It achieved a significant milestone with “Here,” the first major film to use AI for de-aging actors, including Tom Hanks. Operating at the intersection of entertainment and ethics, Metaphysic had two revenue streams: high-end content creation for Hollywood studios and a platform allowing individuals to own and control their digital likeness. The case explores how Hollywood’s longstanding “separated rights” framework—ensuring creators maintain ownership of their work beyond contracted uses—provided a foundation for Metaphysic’s business model and the basis for creators to capture value from new uses of their talent with AI.

However, as AI increasingly codified expertise across sectors, from consulting to private equity, these protections do not extend; employers own workplace data by default. In such environments, when an individual’s expertise can be digitally captured, replicated, and monetized, the case examines who can capture value, and the pivotal role of claiming data rights in complex multi-party negotiations.

Harvard Business School Associate Professor Zoe Cullen and host Brian Kenny explore the tensions between individual rights and commercial applications of AI and the central question of what protections must be forged today to ensure professionals in the future continue to contribute and be compensated in the case, Metaphysic AI: Rethinking the Value of Human Expertise.

In 2025, Harvard Art Museums considered using generative artificial intelligence in a marketing campaign to increase visitor engagement and membership. Looking to boost attendance and appeal to a younger audience base, and facing intensified competition for leisure time, the Museums’ marketing team explored animating a canonical artwork using AI-generated avatars as part of a digital campaign. While the approach promised novelty and attention, it raised internal concerns about brand authenticity, interpretive authority, donor relations, and reputational risk—particularly given broader cultural anxieties surrounding AI and the museums’ association with the Harvard brand.

Harvard Business School Associate Professor Julian De Freitas and Harvard Art Museums Director of Marketing John Connolly join host Brian Kenny to discuss the case, Harvard Art Museums: When Art Meets Artificial Intelligence. They explore tensions between innovation and brand stewardship in cultural marketing, organizational barriers to new technology adoption, and the strategic use of emerging technologies in brand management.

In March 2024, The Atlantic announced a strategic content and product partnership with artificial intelligence giant OpenAI. OpenAI would license The Atlantic’s content to train its models and respond to user queries, while The Atlantic would receive a fee, privileged access to OpenAI’s technology, and “premium” positioning within the tech giant. At the time, over 70 similar deals had been struck between publishers and AI companies.

The Atlantic’s journalists, however, were incensed, concerned that partnering with OpenAI was “a devil’s bargain.” The New York Times had also just sued the tech giant for allegedly using 16 million pieces of the Times’ copyrighted content without permission to train its large language models. Laurene Powell Jobs, the billionaire owner of The Atlantic, had to consider what was in the magazine’s best financial interest and what impact a continued partnership could have on the magazine’s journalism—and more broadly on the ideas landscape as a whole. But, what responsibility did Powell Jobs have to protect creativity and expression? Was Jobs undermining The Atlantic’s reputation, or was she bringing a new business model to bear on an industry facing major headwinds?

Harvard Business School Professor Caroline Elkins joins host Brian Kenny to discuss the case, “The Atlantic and OpenAI.” They explore the question, “Is AI creative?” and how the answer affects not only journalism as we know it, but considerations for whether we can harness AI to enter an age of increased creativity for humankind.

In the summer of 2021, School of Rock was a youth-oriented music education company with 291 franchise- and company-owned schools globally. Before Rob Price became CEO in 2017, School of Rock’s nonconformist culture led to variability in teaching styles, educational outcomes, and risks for copyright violations. Previous attempts to standardize curriculum and processes led to friction with franchisees. Price navigated those tensions by listening more closely to franchisees, clarifying core policies, and giving franchisees freedom in other areas.

One of Price’s major initiatives was the Method App which provided a structure to empower and guide work at the school branches, featuring nearly 100 show programs and 1,000 copyright-compliant song choices tagged with the associated skill levels, musical concepts, and corresponding show programs. When the app launched in 2019, it struggled to gain traction. Some franchisees felt the functionality was flawed; others worried that the app threatened their pedagogical independence. Price’s team considered several options to increase adoption: a listening tour to communicate the app’s value and collect feedback for improvements; an exclusive marketing campaign for schools with a minimum level of app usage; and incentives based on School of Rock’s balanced scorecard that measured performance and other metrics.

Harvard Business School Professors Tatiana Sandino and Jeffrey Rayport joined host Brian Kenny and School of Rock leaders Stacey Ryan, President, and Rob Price, Former CEO for a live taping of Cold Call on the HBS campus. They discussed the case, “School of Rock: Tuning into Structured Empowerment,” and explored how to drive adoption of the Method App across its franchisees without reigniting tensions with the corporate office.

What does it take to be a founder? It’s an important question and one that Cold Call has explored many times over the years. More people than ever before are choosing entrepreneurship as a career path and HBS faculty have written cases to undercover issues ranging from how to scale to how to recover from failure. Today, we’re sharing an episode of The Founder Mindset, produced by Harvard Business School Foundry and hosted by Senior Lecturer Reza Satchu. In this episode, “The Curse of Optionality: Tim Ferriss on Experiments, Risk, and Freedom,” Satchu sits down with writer, podcaster, and investor Tim Ferriss to discuss his blueprint for nimble decision-making and actionable success.

Ferriss turned experimentation into a competitive advantage—authoring multiple #1 New York Times bestsellers, launching one of the world’s most influential podcasts, and investing early in companies like Uber, Facebook, Shopify, and Duolingo. His playbook isn’t about reckless bets—it’s about calibrated risk, smart experiments, and learning faster than the competition. You can find The Founder Mindset with Reza Satchu podcast wherever you listen.

Harvard Business School Professor Len Schlesinger and TypeCoach President Rob Toomey join Brian Kenny to discuss the two mini cases, Night Two in Hanoi: Team Dynamics Under Pressure and Day 6 in Buenos Aires: Fatto Bene. They explore MBA students’ journeys through the first-year FIELD Global Capstone course and how utilizing the TypeCoach personality classications taught them how to recognize and work across cognitive differences, ultimately improving team dynamics and their final project outcome.

Cold Call listeners have complimentary access to the same suite of six TypeCoach tools provided to HBS students at this link:

In early 2024, six months after the highly anticipated launch of Microsoft Copilot across the 62,000-person Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions (MCAPS) organization—one of the world’s largest sales organizations—the initial excitement had not yet materialized into widespread adoption and transformation. But, two years after initiating their AI transformation journey, the organization’s daily active usage of AI tools had reached over 60% and monthly active usage over 98%, significantly altering how sales professionals approached their work. The path to adoption had required Microsoft to evolve its approach based on early deployment insights.

The company had simultaneously developed autonomous sales agents capable of managing end-to-end customer interactions. Unlike Copilot, which acted as an assistant in the flow of work, Sales Agent could take action on its own: it was designed to automate the sales process under pre-specified constraints or guardrails. This innovation presented new and unique challenges.

Harvard Business School Associate Professors Iav Bojinov and Shunyuan Zhang join Brian Kenny to discuss the case, “Microsoft Customer and Partner Solutions: The Deployment of Copilot and Agents.” They explore the company’s journey to successfully mobilizing AI adoption within the sales process, the challenges it faces integrating autonomous sales agents, and what it takes to get thousands of employees to fundamentally change how they work.