This Acquisition Unites Keystone’s AI Strategy and Execution Expertise with Zero Gravitas’ Hands-On Executive Learning Platform, Bolstering Keystone’s AI Navigator Offering
NEW YORK, Sept. 2, 2026 /PRNewswire/ — Keystone, a global advisory firm that guides the most critical technology and science-based platforms and ecosystems, today announced the acquisition of Zero Gravitas – a firm specializing in AI executive education, strategy, and capability development for Fortune 500 C-suite leaders. Zero Gravitas will become part of Keystone’s AI Navigator offering, which develops organizational AI capabilities, and its founder, Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School (HBS) and one of the world’s foremost authorities on AI and digital transformation, joins Keystone as Chief Innovation Advisor.
Lakhani, the Dorothy and Michael Hintze Professor of Business Administration at HBS, founded Zero Gravitas in 2023 to solve an issue he spent years documenting in his research: leaders who understood that AI mattered but had no practical ability to work with it themselves. Since then, the platform has trained more than 20,000 senior leaders at companies across sectors including legal, financial services, technology, entertainment, healthcare, and manufacturing – using a structured model built around learning, doing, imagining, acting, and caring about how AI transforms business and work. The approach gives leaders the practical, firsthand understanding and skills required to drive AI transformation themselves, rather than delegating to technical teams.
Zero Gravitas will be integrated into AI Navigator, Keystone’s dedicated offering for organizations navigating the divide between AI ambition and scalable transformation. AI Navigator draws on Keystone’s triad of expertise in advanced technology, applied economics and business strategy to help C-suite leaders drive AI impact and value across the enterprise. The addition of Zero Gravitas strengthens AI Navigator’s capabilities at the most critical layer: ensuring that the leaders responsible for AI transformation genuinely understand, and can themselves advance, the technologies they are being asked to deploy.
“AI is revolutionizing what it means to lead – and CEOs can’t delegate their way through it,” said Keystone CEO Jeff Marowits. “Karim saw this before anyone else and built Zero Gravitas to address it. There is a tangible difference between a leader who has approved an AI strategy and one who has actually built something – and that difference shows up in the results. Together with AI Navigator, we offer complete strategy, execution, and executive guidance under one roof.”
Lakhani is the Founding Chair of the HBS AI Institute and Founder and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. At HBS he has led education efforts at scale on AI transformation at the executive transformation and online MBA programs, and is Chair of the required AI course for all MBA students.
He is the co-author of the book Competing in the Age of AI (2020), written with Keystone Co-Founder and Co-Chair of Keystone’s Global Strategic Advisory practice, Marco Iansiti, which has become a defining framework for how organizations think about AI-driven transformation. The book provides the first comprehensive view on the transformation of knowledge work and true, rigorous field experiments, that Lakhani and his team have conducted. His recent research on the impact of generative AI on knowledge work, creativity, and business performance has shaped how hyperscalers and AI-native companies have thought about AI, how business leaders have adopted AI, and how academics have shaped their scholarship. His research also includes the Cybernetic Teammate study, which found that individuals working alongside AI matched the performance of entire teams working without it. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and HBS cases. Lakhani holds a Ph.D. in Management and an SM in Technology and Policy from MIT and a bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering and Management from McMaster University.
“Most CEOs, board members and senior executives know that AI will reshape their business. Far fewer have the practical capability to lead that change themselves – and the distance between those two groups is growing,” said Lakhani. “Zero Gravitas combined with Keystone’s AI Navigator, helps to close the gap and drives alignment among executive teams to go from being AI curious all the way to AI enterprise transformation.”
About Keystone
Keystone is a global advisory firm that guides the most critical technology and science-based platforms and ecosystems. We bring together technologists, economists, and strategists to tackle the highest-stakes questions of competition and disruption. For more than two decades, Keystone has helped CEOs, CLOs, and Boards navigate their most consequential decisions across technology, legal, and government arenas. Founded in 2003, Keystone operates worldwide with offices in New York, San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, London, Dubai, and Washington, D.C. For more information, visit keystone.com.
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