MIT Sloan School of Management

Platform Strategy: Designing for Humans and AI Agents

MIT Sloan School of Management

Business Analytics

About Programme

Why attend Platform Strategy?

The most valuable companies of the last two decades — Apple's App Store, Amazon Marketplace, Uber, Airbnb, Visa — produce almost none of what is bought and sold on them. What they do is design the interactions between two or more groups and capture part of the value those interactions create.

Something new is now arriving on these platforms: AI agents — software that searches, negotiates, and transacts on a user's behalf, increasingly without the user watching. When one side of a market is run by agents instead of people, the questions that have always defined platform strategy — who to admit, what to charge, how to keep the ecosystem honest — do not go away. Rather, they get harder, and perhaps even more interesting. Agents can strip out the cost of finding the right counterparty and the cost of closing a deal. They can also flood a market with noise, fake the signals it runs on, and break the mechanisms that keep participants safe.

Platform Strategy: Designing for Humans and AI Agents teaches the durable logic of multi-sided platforms as a structured playbook for design and decision-making — how platforms create value, to how they are “cored,” seeded, and monetized, through to how they must be governed as they scale, and how that logic shifts when agents join. Drawing on economics, market design, and competitive strategy, it prepares you to make the decisions that matter most: which interactions to enable, which side to attract first, what to charge, and how to govern a market where humans and agents do business side by side. AI runs through the whole program, and one of its four half-days is given over entirely to the agent era.

You will leave able to look at any platform — one you run, one you advise, or one you are about to compete with — and say where it is headed, and what to do about it.

Course Topics

Programme Content

Day 1

8:00 AM – 10:00 AM

What is a Platform? & Value Creation from Platforms

10:00 AM – 10:15 AM

Break

10:15 AM – 12:00 PM

Coring a Platform

Day 2

8:00 AM – 9:30 AM

Seeding a Platform

9:30 AM – 9:45 AM

Break

9:45 AM – 12:00 PM

Interviewing.io

Day 3

8:00 AM – 9:30 AM

Extracting Value from Platforms: Equilibrium, Enticement, and Evolution

9:30 AM – 9:45 AM

Break

9:45 AM – 12:00 PM

Platforming Leakage & Pricing Dilemnas

Day 4

8:00 AM – 10:00 AM

AI Agents as Platform Participants: New Value, New Frictions

10:00 AM – 10:15 AM

Break

10:15 AM – 10:30 AM

Executive Certificate Ceremony

10:30 AM – 11:45 AM

Governing Platforms Where Humans and Agents Coexist

11:45 AM – 12:00 PM

Program Wrap-Up

Programme Objective

By the end of this course, participants should be able to:

Identify examples of traditional and non-traditional forms of digital platforms

Describe the common evolution patterns of multisided platforms, including same-side vs. cross-side network effects

Identify customer and user groups whose affiliation with the platform is most valuable

Decide whether to try to “tie” customers to a platform or not – the value of open vs. proprietary networks

Design strategies to undermine an established platform or to defend against such attacks

Describe the principles of platform pricing and how to inform the design of an effective pricing format

Recognize the concrete implications of trade-offs in platform design, governance, and staging

Decide whether a given value proposition is best developed as a stand-alone platform, as a complement embedded into another platform’s ecosystem, or whether to pivot away from digital platform strategies all together.

Upon successful completion of your course, you will earn a certificate of completion from the MIT Sloan School of Management. This course may also count toward MIT Sloan Executive Certificate requirements.

The course will cover these cases and important examples of digital platform strategy:

Interviewing.io

Beepi

Google vs Bing

Dropbox v. Google Drive

E-Harmony

Roppongi Hills

PayPal

Uber

Hulu vs Netflix

Programme Audience

This course is intended for:

Leaders of corporate strategy and business development
Marketing executives
Product and service development leaders
R&D and innovation executives
Heads of application development and content management
Leaders evaluating how AI agents will reshape their industry's competitive dynamics

"The course is extremely well executed and sets the tone for the future of technology. It felt like a luxury to have the time to delve into the definition and break it down, so you can allow yourself to truly immerse yourself in the platform world. The professor was of star quality and brought pedigree and knowledge to the subject that is still so fresh. I recommend highly."

"Very actionable course with a good mix of theory and practical sessions. I highly recommend this course. It has equipped me with a robust toolkit and strategic blueprint for structured platform business model creation."

Programme Benefits

Informed Insights

Gain robust insights into how you can refresh your company’s digital platform strategy and participate profitably in the multi-sided marketplaces of the future

AI Integration

Learn how to anticipate and respond to the arrival of AI agents on your platform, whether as complements to human participants or substitutes for them.

Pricing Strategy

Understand the principles of platform pricing and how to inform the design of an effective pricing format

Best Practices

Recognize the concrete implications of trade-offs in platform design, governance, and staging

Certificate

Earn a certificate of course completion from the MIT Sloan School of Management

Testimonials

"It is a great course on platform strategy. Shortly after the class, I found myself evaluating a potential partnership and discovered that this course provided tremendous value by helping me identify 8 additional sources of network value that I otherwise would have missed."

Allen N

"It is a great course with a deep analysis of digital platforms. In this course, you will learn how to identify platforms, sides, and interactions. This is the future of any business."

Carlos Enrique A

"The course is extremely well executed and sets the tone for the future of technology. It felt like a luxury to have the time to delve into the definition and break it down, so you can allow yourself to truly immerse yourself in the platform world. The professor was of star quality and brought pedigree and knowledge to the subject that is still so fresh. I recommend highly. My only reason for 4-stars was that I wish the course had been over five days, instead of two!"

Isabella L

"I thoroughly enjoyed the class. The professor was excellent! My table mates were awesome! I highly recommend taking the in-person version of this course!"

Dean B

"The program offers comprehensive insights into developing successful digital platform strategies. Whether youre launching a new platform or optimizing an existing one, this course equips you with the knowledge needed to take your platform from ideation to deployment and scale."

Jenna Z

"Very actionable course with a good mix of theory and practical sessions. I highly recommend this course. It has equipped me with a robust toolkit and strategic blueprint for structured platform business model creation."

Mario L

"The Professors conducting the Platform Strategy course ensure that you are aware of the stand-alone benefits and the network benefits of a platform. Then take you through an elaborate journey involving various case study analysis, course work, and a shark tank style ending - all of which makes you dig deep into what makes a successful platform. The course is really insightful and lays the foundation that you can take advantage of and build upon to create your own platform, if you want to!"

Shubharanjan D

"This course was a great learning experience for its content, insights, and brainstorming sessions with the best professors. Highly recommend it!"

Ritu K

"Great faculty, very engaged learning, and content is the best"

Satish K

"Truly a fantastic framework to think about modern business platforms, and opportunities to migrate your own business model."

Craig D

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Speak with an Advisor

  1. Pedagogy (case method, experiential learning, coaching, simulations)
  2. Contact Person Details

Prashansa Uttam

Programme Advisor

+91 9403890085[email protected]Mon – Fri, 9am – 5pm IST

MIT Sloan School of Management

Executive Education Office

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https://mitsloan.mit.edu
Cambridge, USA

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Platform Strategy: Designing for Humans and AI Agents | MIT Sloan