Keystone has acquired Zero Gravitas, an AI executive education and strategy firm that has trained more than 20,000 senior leaders across legal services, financial services, technology, entertainment, healthcare and manufacturing. The deal folds Zero Gravitas into Keystone's AI Navigator offering, creating a combined service that pairs executive capability development with the firm's existing work in advanced technology, applied economics and business strategy.
Zero Gravitas founder Karim Lakhani, a professor at Harvard Business School, will join Keystone as Chief Innovation Advisor. Lakhani launched the firm in 2023 to give C-suite leaders hands-on experience building with AI, rather than confining their role to strategy documents and oversight committees. The platform uses a framework built around learning, doing, imagining, acting and understanding how AI alters business and work.
Who Karim Lakhani brings to the table
Lakhani is the Founding Chair of the Harvard Business School AI Institute and Founder and Co-Director of the Laboratory for Innovation Science at Harvard. He has published more than 150 peer-reviewed papers and HBS cases, and he co-authored Competing in the Age of AI with Keystone co-founder Marco Iansiti. That existing relationship means the acquisition extends a collaboration already years in the making.
What the combined offering looks like
Keystone plans to integrate Zero Gravitas directly into AI Navigator. The result, the firm said, is a single roof under which organizations get executive education, strategy consulting and technical execution support. Jeff Marowits, CEO of Keystone, framed the gap the acquisition targets: "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."
Lakhani described the distance between executives who recognize AI will reshape their business and those who can lead that change as growing. "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," he said.
Why this matters for executives and strategy leaders
The acquisition signals that the market for executive AI capability is consolidating around offerings that combine education with technical delivery. For senior leaders, the message is straightforward: approving an AI budget is not the same as understanding how the technology changes decision-making, organizational design and competitive dynamics. Firms that invest in building practical AI fluency at the top are betting that capability gap will separate winners from observers. Executives looking to build that fluency can explore structured learning paths such as the AI Learning Path for CEOs or track developments in AI for Executives & Strategy.
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