Drumm NcNaughton: My guests today are David Marchick and Angela Virtu from American University in DC. David’s the Dean of the Kogod School of Business, while Angela is a professional lecturer at Kogod’s Information Technology and Analytics Department. Six months ago, David and a committee of faculty members launched an initiative to integrate AI at the business school. They established the initiative in six weeks, and in six months they’ve incorporated AI into all majors at Kogod, ensuring all graduates know how to use AI platforms and tools ethically. These new AI integrated majors will launch this fall and will include more than 20 new and updated courses, certificates offerings for students, private sector partnerships, and faculty training. David and Angela joined me today to talk about how they’ve made these transformational changes in six months and how you too can do this at your own institution. Dave, Angela, welcome to the program.
David Marchick: Thanks for having us.
Angela Virtu: Happy to be here.
McNaughton: Looking forward to a great conversation on AI. You guys are at American University at Kogod, which I guess is your business school, is that correct?
Marchick: That’s correct. It’s named after a great real estate executive and leader named Robert Kogod.
McNaughton: Thank you. I didn’t know that. Thank you, Mr. Kogod for being willing to sponsor Americans Business School. You’ve got some great people there, and we’re looking forward to seeing how they’re transforming the school with artificial intelligence. Before we get into it, folks, if you could give us a little bit of background on who you are and how we got to this place to where you’re transforming the business school.
Marchick: I’m probably the least likely person to be a dean in the whole country. I’m not an academic. I did teach for four years at the Tuck School of Business. But my background is in private equity, as a lawyer and in government and I was just approached about the job and I thought this would be a great, fulfilling, interesting, and challenging thing to do for this next phase of my life and career. And it’s been wonderful, and they haven’t thrown me out yet and hopefully I don’t mess it up.
McNaughton: Yeah, it’s like the old change of command in the Navy. I had it. You got it. Don’t drop it.
Marchick: Exactly.
McNaughton: Angela, you’re a tech head.
Virtu: Yes, I am. So I spent my career building and deploying AI solutions for a bunch of different startups in the Washington DC area. And then I joined American universities faculty this past fall as an instructor in the information technology and analytics department. And then I’ve been a part of this AI initiative since around March, when we did the big kickoff, and I’m happy to be here, so thanks.
McNaughton: It’s my pleasure to have you both on the program. I am just amazed at what you guys are doing. AI is such a big thing right now. So many colleges are basically, you may as well hang garlic around your neck, that’s what they think about AI, but you’re embracing it. So how did this come about?
Marchick: It’s really quite interesting. I actually was just doing my goals for my boss, the provost, for the academic year, and I looked back at my goals for last year. to see how I did. Some things I did well, some things not so well, but the word AI wasn’t even mentioned in our strategic plan or goals. So what happened is we bring a lot of great speakers to school. We’ve had something like 30 CEOs speak in the last two years. Marriott and Ernst Young and Carlisle and just some great businesses. We had the president of Google who came, Kent Walker, and he said that, his boss has said that AI is akin to the discovery of fire and electricity. And I thought that’s kind of hyperbole, but maybe if it’s even 1 percent or 1/10th percent true, that’s a big deal. And then we had a CEO named Brett Wilson, who’s a venture capitalist. He’s built, taken public and sold to companies in the nexus of AI. He came and spoke and a student, a young, I think a sophomore or so, raised his hand and said, am I going to be replaced by AI? And Brett paused and looked at him and said, you’re not going to be replaced by AI, but you could be replaced by someone who knows AI if you don’t know AI. And at that moment, a bulb went off in my head, and I really, I’m not a techie and I’m not academic, but I basically said, we need to do something to prepare students because AI is going to be like reading, writing, and reasoning. It’s an essential skill. So I went to my senior associate dean, Parthiban David, who’s a wonderful guy and a traditional academic and I said, what do we do about this, we got to do something, and he said, let’s form a committee. And I’m like, oh, come on.
McNaughton: That’s an academic response for sure.
Marchick: I’m like, this is going to be like a two-year process with a 300-page report that nobody reads. And to his credit, he said, I’m going to give the committee six weeks. They need to come back with something short and actionable, and they did. And we had a great committee that came back and said we should embrace AI and incorporate it into the entire curriculum. We should develop two types of courses. Artisan courses, which are a light touch of AI, and Sage courses, where more than fifty percent of the course is based on AI. Let’s have them in the first year, in the core curriculum, in every department, and as electives. And I had that meeting, and I said, run as fast as you can, let’s do it. And we did it. And then we approached Angela, who actually knows what she’s doing, unlike me. And we said, would you be, something we’re creating, called the AI Faculty Teaching Fellow? So, you can train our faculty and bring experts in to train our faculty on AI so they can teach our students. And I’ll turn it over to you, Angela.
Virtu: Yeah, so as a part of this training, my goal is to get all of our faculty and all of our staff on board with the AI movement and make sure that we all are prepared and using it and understand how all of our disciplines are leveraging AI and In the real world in the business setting that way, we can do the best job possible to prepare all of our students. So they’re not the ones getting left behind with the advent of AI.
McNaughton: So that’s a major lift because you’re doing twenty plus courses.
Marchick: It’s a huge lift. And what we did is we asked people to raise their hands, faculty. And a bunch did, and then we encouraged a few others that didn’t raise their hands. So, I actually, in anticipation of this podcast, checked in with Parthiban David, the senior associate dean and he said, “everything’s on track. We have courses developed. We’re going to teach AI as part of, basically when the students get here, their orientation, we’re going to start them right away.” And we have faculty getting continuing education themselves this summer to be able to teach AI. Some of it is in Angela’s department which is the natural place where you would think that we would have programming or fundamentals of AI or fundamentals of machine learning. And that’s great, but I think the neatest part of this is that the other departments are doing it.
So in finance, we have a quantitative analysis using AI of finance and investments class. In our management course, we have a great business entertainment major. We’re on the Billboard top schools for business entertainment and AI is going to revolutionize the entertainment industry. That’s what the strike was all about. And so, one of our faculty in that field said, I’ll teach a course on AI in the music industry and the entertainment industry. So, it’s a whole new course. We have a faculty member who’s a forensic accounting expert who was part of the Madoff investigation. He’s talking to all the forensic accounting firms, the big four, about how they’re using AI to do forensic accounting. And think about forensic accounting. You’re trying to find that needle in the haystack, and that’s what AI does. It can process massive amounts of data and create coherent outputs.
McNaughton: I’m curious, you bring up an interesting point, and from Angela’s perspective, to do forensic accounting using AI, does it require reprogramming? What’s that process?
Virtu: So I’m not at all a forensic accounting expert, so I will defer that to all of our accounting colleagues, let’s say. But I know one of the main goals of using AI in that forensic field is to try to help them find the needle in the haystack. Like, how can we sift through all of the documentation, all of these numbers, all of these memos, and how can we find that one incongruency or that one inconsistency that would highlight that, I don’t want to say fraud, but the issue at hand, whether that’s fraud or whatever else being. In terms of how the AI can do that, there’s context, there’s ways in how you can feed the AI all of the context, all of the, here’s good examples, here’s bad examples, here’s the existing fraud patterns that we know, and they can use that as a kind of baseline to feed all of their current case or all their current documentation. Now, is that how they’re exactly doing it? Again, that’s not my expert play, so I could be off there, but from the tech side, that’s how I would approach it at least.
McNaughton: Okay. I’m sorry, Dave. I didn’t mean to interrupt you. It was just, you brought up a really interesting point and I wanted to dive down a little deeper on it.
Marchick: Yeah, I’ll give you one other example. We have a digital marketing course. That’s a course for, say, sophomores and juniors that are marketing majors. Or they could be business majors, but they want to take a specialization in marketing. If you think about how AI is going to change the field of marketing, it’s going to be radical. Let me give you an example. For one of the training sessions that Angela put together for our faculty and staff, we brought in a fellow named Ira Rubenstein, who’s now Senior Vice President for Marketing for PBS, and he ran marketing for Sony and Marvel. He’s part of the Motion Picture Association of America. He’s one of the best marketers in the country. He told a story, which for PBS, Ken Burns is a major source of content, and Ken Burns did a documentary on the Buffalo. So Ira has dozens of creative staff, several marketing agencies, what you would expect of a big content provider. He went to an image creation software, an AI software, and basically plugged in; give me an image, a Ken Burns like poster of an American Buffalo with a native American theme. Because the story of the Buffalo is inextricably tied with the history of indigenous people in the United States. And it came up with an image in 30 seconds and he printed it out and brought it over to his head of visual and said, do something like this. And four hours, they had something that would have taken weeks, 30 different images, endless debates. Then you send it out to your marketing PR firm and they play with it and spend 50,000 dollars. And it was done. And then all of the algorithms that you see when you go to Netflix, when they’re suggesting, here are the films that you might like based on what you’ve seen before. And when I go to Netflix, the films they suggest are very different than the films they suggest for my twenty-year-old son, which tend to be like Ben Stiller and Adam Sandler. And so, all of that is AI and PBS does the same, so that if you log into PBS’s website, they’re suggesting content for you. And then they’re using AI to write digital marketing campaigns, to write emails, to write communications, to communicate, and they’re using AI for customer service. And so our faculty is basically redoing their digital marketing course to incorporate AI because you can’t do digital marketing today without knowing AI. It’s an essential skill.
McNaughton: So this is really helpful, and I certainly hope listeners are as fascinated by this as I am. I’d like to go through the process that you use because it’s very clear that AI is going to be a major tool that businesses use, and we need to prepare our graduates for it. To create that shared vision across the school, you started off with a committee with representatives from all departments. Take us through that process, if you wouldn’t mind.
Marchick: So Parthiban David, who’s the senior associate dean asked a fellow named Erran Carmel, who’s a long time, great faculty member and a futurist, to chair this committee, along with Gwanhoo Lee, who’s the head of our IT department. And they asked each of the department chairs to give them a representative. And honestly, they just made it up. I wish I could say it was more sophisticated than that, but everybody’s making it up for AI.
McNaughton: Yeah.