Future-ready strategy & AI
Reading the signals that matter, including what AI makes possible and what it changes, building strategic foresight, and translating what's coming into a plan the organisation can act on.
INSEAD · Technology & Operations Management
Michael Freeman
As an INSEAD professor, I help senior leaders build future-ready organisations. My current focus is the hard part most are getting wrong: designing agentic AI they can trust, with a method of my own, Design the Agent.
Research featured in
01 About
Empirical evidence on the decisions that run organisations and the design of systems that improve them.
Michael Freeman is a tenured Associate Professor of Technology and Operations Management at INSEAD. He holds a PhD in Management Science from the University of Cambridge (Judge Business School), where he remains a Research Fellow at the Cambridge Centre for Health Leadership & Enterprise.
His award-winning research, with six papers in Management Science, has reached the front pages of national newspapers. His current work turns on a question every executive team now faces: how people and algorithms should share decisions, and how to design AI agents an organisation can trust.
He teaches across INSEAD's MBA, Global EMBA, PhD and Executive programmes, including the flagship Advanced Management Programme for C-suite executives, and has twice received the school's Executive Education Award for Outstanding Teaching.
02 Executive Education
Building the future-ready organisation.
Michael works with executive teams to address real business challenges and uncover opportunities they can act on: strategic reinvention, operational and cultural transformation, and effective AI strategy. He has partnered with senior leaders across industries, from healthcare to financial services, in bespoke company engagements.
Innovation & disruption
New business models, the dynamics of disruption, and growth strategies that hold up when the landscape is shifting: how to read where value is moving and build the models to capture it.
Operational transformation
Turning strategy into how the organisation actually runs: redesigning processes, rewiring culture, and building the operating model that makes change stick.
Formats
- Keynote
- Workshop
- Multi-day programme
- Week-long programme
From a single keynote to a week-long intervention on organisational and cultural transformation, built bespoke for one company.
Signature sessionFrom Chatbot to Agentic AI
A hands-on session on how modern AI agents really work, beyond the chatbot. Leaders look inside a real agent, then work through the design decisions behind whether one can be trusted once it is live. Based on the Design the Agent methodology and the forthcoming book.
How the method works →Enquire about a programme →Signature sessionThe Phoenix Encounter
An INSEAD method for radical reinvention. The leadership team imagines its business burned to the ground by disruption, then rebuilds it to rise stronger from the ashes. A structured way to confront what could destroy you, and move first.
The method, in MIT Sloan Management Review →Enquire about a programme →Selected organisations Michael has taught and advised
Company-specific and customised executive programmes, 2019–2025.
03 Flagship work
Don't prompt.
Design.
Most agentic AI fails for a reason that gets worse as the models improve. Every design decision you skip before deploying an agent is a debt, and model capability is the interest rate.
Design the Agent is Michael's framework for paying that debt down while it is still cheap. It centres on the Agentic AI Design Canvas, a one-page tool for the nine decisions that determine whether an agent can be trusted, and on the Agent Operating Model, which sees every agent as three layers: the worker that thinks, the harness that controls, and the tools that give it reach.
04 The book
The method, in long form.
Don't Prompt, Design: a field guide to designing agentic AI, for the executives who have to answer for it.
It turns that method into a working playbook: the nine decisions, the failure modes, and real cases of agentic AI succeeding and failing, drawn from the work Michael does with executives at INSEAD. It is written for leaders who are deploying agents faster than they are designing them.
In development
05 Research
How organisations actually work, studied at scale.
Three threads run through the work: how the design of service operations shapes outcomes, how organisations decide under uncertainty, and, most recently, how human and machine intelligence can be combined well.
Healthcare Operations
How the decisions embedded in healthcare delivery shape patient outcomes at scale, and what rigorous empirical evidence can tell organisations about designing it better.
Empirical Operations & Decision Quality
Large-scale causal analysis of how organisations make operational decisions inside multi-stage systems, drawing on datasets of millions of records.
AI & Algorithms in Operations
How people and algorithms share the work: algorithmic gatekeeping, AI guidance in tiered services, and the design of agents that can be trusted.
Selected publications
Kajaria-Montag, H., Freeman, M., & Scholtes, S. (2024). Continuity of care increases physician productivity in primary care. Management Science, 70(11).
Freeman, M., Robinson, S., & Scholtes, S. (2021). Gatekeeping, fast and slow: An empirical study of referral errors in the emergency department. Management Science, 67(7).
Freeman, M., Savva, N., & Scholtes, S. (2021). Economies of scale and scope in hospitals: An empirical study of volume spillovers. Management Science, 67(2).
Freeman, M., & Ding, J. (2026). Algorithmic gatekeeping. Under review, Management Science.
View all publications → Also on Google Scholar.
06 In the media
Research that reached the front page.
A study Michael co-authored on continuity of care, with Kajaria-Montag and Scholtes, was front-page news in The Guardian and The Telegraph on 23 February 2024, and was also covered by the BBC, The Times, The Independent, and across the trade press.
Front pageSeeing same GP improves patient health and cuts workload of doctorsRead →
Front pageSeeing the same GP means fewer visits to the doctorRead →
Seeing the same GP reduces appointments, Cambridge study findsRead →
Seeing same GP boosts health and could ease appointment backlogRead →
Study finds seeing the same GP improves care and cuts workloadRead →
Having a ‘regular doctor’ can significantly reduce GP workload, study findsRead →
07 Contact
Get in touch.
For executive-education enquiries, speaking, media, or research collaborations, send a note and I’ll get back to you. You can also email directly.
michael.freeman@insead.eduINSEAD · 1 Ayer Rajah Avenue · Singapore 138676