HARVARD BUSINESS REVIEW X Vasya Kolotusha

Vasya Kolotusha's illustration of a robotic hand casting a ballot captures the tension at the center of Harvard Business Review's latest research: what happens when AI, not people, makes the call. The image's mechanical fingers delivering a checked, approved vote mirror the article's core finding, that across banking, recruitment, and biotechnology, AI systems are increasingly the ones "deciding," while the humans left to explain those decisions were never in the room where they were made.

That gap between who decides and who has to justify it is exactly what the research surfaces. Employees don't simply pass along AI's verdicts, they mask them, dress them up, or work to make sense of them, depending on who they're accountable to. Kolotusha's glowing, almost ceremonial rendering of automation casting its vote gives that abstract tension a striking visual form: a future where the machine's decision looks final and official, even when the humans around it are still scrambling to explain it.

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