Zach Fernebok
David, thank you so much for being on Inside the GMAT.

David Marchick
Thanks for having me.

Zach Fernebok
Before we dive in, I do want to say to you face to face that my time at AU, at Kogod, in the Master’s in Marketing program was one of the most formative experiences of my life. Actually, right before we started recording, I talked with the director of the program and said the same thing to him: that it really meant everything to me.

David Marchick
I think that's great. It's a great program. And I think the combination of your skills in drama and then with business skills is a great combination because you know how to communicate, present, and then you have the foundations of business skills and marketing skills. That's a powerful combination.

Zach Fernebok
I agree, and it's one that I learned over the course of my time there to really embrace. When I started, I was really nervous. My joke was the closest I ever got to a math equation was to be or not to be. And then by the time I graduated, my math skills were on par, if not above those of my cohort. So it was really a huge confidence boost, and it's why I love doing this podcast within the margins of my job at GMAC, to be able to hopefully give other people who listen confidence as well.

David Marchick
That's great. Well, I love hearing about your evolution and I love seeing non-quantitative people learn that skill and become confident. That's part of what we do.

Zach Fernebok
Yeah, definitely. So before we dive into the meat of the conversation, I do want to ask: how did you end up here at Kogod? What was the path like and what was your founding interest in business education and leadership?

David Marchick
That's a good question. My whole career, I would say, is a little accidental. And I found myself repeatedly in jobs that I'm probably not qualified for, including this one. I'm a business school dean without a business degree, with no PhD, with no real educational leadership experience. Otherwise, I have all the skills, maybe. I don't know.
But I have had four careers. I've had a career in government in the Clinton and Biden administration. I was a lawyer. I was a partner at a law firm called Covington & Burling where I did international M&A and regulatory work. And then I was a partner and one of the senior executives at the Carlyle Group at a financial services and investment firm. And that was a great experience. And basically I got lucky there. I was early and we went public.
And I spent 12 wonderful years there. And then I essentially had the flexibility to retire early. And I didn't know what I wanted to do with my life. So I started teaching at the Tuck School of Business where I knew the dean of the business school and I taught a private equity course. And I just loved it. I loved, at this phase of my life, helping young people—helping them launch, helping them learn—in the same way that your master's in marketing was a transformational experience. And I was in the Biden administration and I got a call from a
headhunter about this role and I live a mile away, I've known AU forever. And here I am. And so it's been fantastic. I joke that at this phase of my career, I'm looking less for income and more for psychic income. And I get a lot of psychic income from helping young people launch.

Zach Fernebok
That's amazing. I love that term, psychic income.

David Marchick
There's a lot of frustration in academia too, but I do get a lot of psychic income.

Zach Fernebok
Sure, well, psychic powers can lead to a lot of frustration. So what feels fundamentally different now about business education compared to when you started just a few years ago?

David Marchick
I wake up and go to sleep thinking about how AI is going to change business education, education overall and change the future of work. We've been embarking on a journey at Kogod that started three and a half years ago when one of the top people at Google came to AU and said that AI was going to be as profound as fire or electricity. And I listened to that and I thought, well, that's got to be a little BS, a little hyperbole. But if he's one one-millionth right, fire and electricity are profound.
So, I went to our faculty and said, we have to infuse AI in everything we do. that future graduates need to have the fundamentals of business, marketing, accounting, finance, et cetera, plus be fluent and literate in AI. And I was new here. And so the head of the faculty said, all right, we'll form a committee. And my eyes kind of rolled to the back of my head, and the C-word made me start gagging a little because I'm like, this is gonna be a three-year exercise. They're gonna give me a report. It's gonna be on the shelf that goes nowhere. And I said, okay, you can form a committee, but the committee has six weeks to do its work and no more than five pages. Give me a blueprint for diffusing AI into business school. And so that blueprint became our plan. And last year, we won an award. When all the awards came out, there was Harvard and Stanford and Wharton. And there was AU, not typically in the same sentence as Wharton and UVA, for the best AI program in the country. So I'm very proud of that, but I'm also uneasy with the fact that it's changing so fast and we need to run faster to stay ahead.

Zach Fernebok
Yeah, I read an interview that you did with Poets and Quants where you said that AU has to run, not walk to get in front of the line. And that really resonated with me.
So as you know, my father-in-law used to teach at Kogod—a distinguished professor. Very distinguished professor, a very distinguished mustache. So shout out if you're watching. But every time AU was in the news, especially about AI, he'd ping me, he'd send me the article. And that's how you got on my radar because I saw, of course I'm connected, I'm an alum. I could be more active as an alum. And it really was like, wow, something is happening here.
And when I met you last year, I expected to hear a lot about AI in our conversation, which I did. But what I was also really struck by was how much you care about the personal transition into business school. Of course, working at GMAC, I deal a lot with the transition into a graduate management education, usually someone getting a full-time MBA, pivoting their career. But you seem to have a very unique passion for making sure that folks are getting the most out of their business education. Is that because of your non-traditional dean background, or is it something you got bit with when you got bit with the academia bug, or is it something else?

David Marchick
I think it's a few things. One is my own path. I would say I was not a very good student. I was a late bloomer. My kids and my wife would say I'm still not mature. I really didn't get my act together until I was really a sophomore in college. I think I'd lacked confidence in writing and fundamentals. And then something clicked when I was a sophomore.
But I learned as much outside the classroom as I did inside the classroom. And I learned that people have different paths. So at Carlyle or Covington & Burling, two-thirds of the people that work there went to Stanford, Harvard, Yale, or whatever. And there I was with not one of the elite schools, not Phi Beta Kappa, but I was one of the senior people. And I felt that I was able to succeed because I had other skills that were not skills that one traditionally learns in the classroom, and also skills that one can develop later in life. So I want, I basically think that when a student comes here, either as a freshman, 18 years old, or as a grad student, they need to master not only what's in the classroom, but more importantly, what's outside the classroom, and learn how to communicate, like you are an expert in. Learn how to work with others, try and fail a lot, learn to be a good public speaker. I was a terrible, nervous public speaker when I was 19 or 20, or even 24. And it was only through practice that I was confident and able to, I could get up and give a speech in front of 5,000 people today with no problem. But I didn't have that experience and nobody taught me
And what I learned much, like your acting career or someone shooting free throws, is you get better through reps. Yes. You try and fail. And I tell students, I'd rather have you fail miserably in class or at the university rather than fail in a job when it really matters.

Zach Fernebok
Yeah, you're reminding me of times when I feel like I became recommitted to my craft as an actor or as a playwright after receiving reviews that maybe weren't favorable. That's a form of failure, of course. And I think about it all the time. Yeah, I love that. I mean, as a Kogod graduate, I often felt like I had the freedom to...if not fail, at least try different things for sure.
And I'm not surprised to hear that that's something that you're passionate about. I think immediately about being in this location where there's so much opportunity and possibility that if you are afraid to fail, then you're not taking advantage of this city.

David Marchick
This city is one of the greatest cities in the world. I came here in December of 1992 when President Clinton got elected. It was really my first job. And two or three months in, I'm sitting in the Oval Office or on Air Force One. I thought, hey, this is pretty cool job. Now in hindsight, I look back and I say, how lucky were you as a 25-year-old to be able to have that experience? I just thought it was like a good first job.
You can do anything in DC, and DC has changed since I was a young person. You know, it's now a technology city. You can work in museums. You can work in theater. You can work in journalism. You can work for trade associations or nonprofits. Yeah, you can do anything here. We're the home of some of the biggest corporations in world, Marriott and Hilton and others. So it's a wonderful place to learn, a wonderful place to live, and a wonderful place to raise family.

Zach Fernebok
Definitely. According to GMAC 2025 application trends survey, have the stat here, for graduate management education is still climbing worldwide despite economic challenges, global mobility being impacted. Do you think that growth is happening in spite of disruption like AI or because of it?

David Marchick
So I think it's changing. Start with undergraduate business education. When I was young, undergraduate business education was not really a thing. And today I believe it's the fastest growing and largest major in undergraduate anywhere. Graduate education is also changing as well. So for example, when I was young, the MBA was the be all and end all degree.
And if you went to Harvard and got an MBA and you went to Procter & Gamble and you were in the marketing department of Procter & Gamble or IBM, you had made it. Today, it's changed. And so, for example, your path is much more typical than it was 30 or 40 years ago, which is you were an actor, you were in theater, you were an artist, you were creative. And you're like, okay, I want to take my creativity and some business skills and go into marketing. And so the marketing degree at a graduate level, which is a one or one and half year degree, allowed you to pivot. And that's why the publication that covers business schools is called Poets and Quants, because you could be a poet and get a business degree, or you could be a quant and get a business degree.
Fundamentally, I think that business degrees do fulfill a real important purpose and help launch careers and give you skills for the future. I think one of the problems with the way that business degrees are evaluated is there's so much focus on your first job, when you get it, what your salary is, et cetera. If I were evaluated on my first job, if I had a $28,000 salary, it would have hurt my school's rank, but I had a wonderful career that evolved and I got lucky and was able to earn a lot of money later in life. But my first job was in government and I was like a kid and doing nothing. I was doing not very important work.
So I think that people should think about business education as an investment in the long term and that when they're here, it's like a co-investment relationship. We're providing a platform for co-investment and people will get out of it what they put into it. So the more they invest, the more they'll get out of it.

Zach Fernebok
Well, speaking of providing platforms for people, you have established a partnership with Perplexity. You've established an AI lab as part of Kogod. I'd love to hear a little bit more about how you're running, not walking, to get ahead of AI. I mean, you have seemed to quite meaningfully integrate AI into the business curriculum.

David Marchick
Everything. We've incorporated AI into everything. It's incorporated into our operations, into our teaching, incorporated into our faculty research.

Zach Fernebok
Am I talking to AI right now?

David Marchick
No. But there I do have an AI voice, which I've trained through a software called 11 Labs. And you could actually do a podcast using AI with your voice and even your image if you want it. It's coming. So our journey has been both evolutionary and revolutionary in some ways. And Poets of Quants, when they gave us the award, said that we have undertaken the most consequential AI transformation anywhere in business education, which is something that makes me very proud. I think the most important thing is that we created a culture of innovation, adoption, and a willingness to fail.
So I did an interview this morning with the Financial Times on what we've done in AI, and I said during the, this is our three and a half years in, first year we had to go and ask for guinea pigs, five or seven professors, will you try to teach your course, marketing, finance, using AI, teach about AI and teach with AI. And we had a few reluctant hands up, but basically we started. The next year we got 30 or 40% of our faculty and then, over the summer of 2025, a couple of the associate deans and I started to email faculty over the summer saying, hey, what are you thinking about doing in AI for the fall classes? And basically, we got to 90% of our faculty were
using AI. And there was a big cultural change in that nobody wanted to be left behind. Last November or December, I asked my team to give me the number of classes that we offer that include AI. And we couldn't count. So now, instead of really enumerating the number of classes with AI, I think we should really focus on the number of classes without AI. So if you're an 18-year-old coming here as a freshman, you get a perplexity enterprise account that's the highest level. Everything's protected. It's all private. And then our faculty has used perplexity and other tools to infuse AI. So you can create your own tutor. You create your own practice tests. We've created our own mini LLMs per class.
And I'll give you another example. In marketing, the program that you took. When you graduate and you take your capstone in marketing, a professor named Kelly Frias has basically created a capstone class so that when you graduate, you will have learned up to seven or eight different AI tools in marketing to do image generation, A-B testing, content creation, monitoring. Our students create apps that generate social media content turn into influence our campaigns and then monitor them. And so in the same way that maybe when you were enacting, you had a portfolio that you would roll out to when you tried out, you we want our students to have a portfolio of apps and tools they've created using AI for marketing, finance and other subjects. So we are driving hard to stay ahead and we're thinking and learning every day, and we're trying new things. There's no – you just got to keep running. Towards it, not away from it.

Zach Fernebok
Something that I love about working at GMAT, and I never thought I would say this, that I love a test, but something I like about the GMAT exam is that when you study for it, you learn about how to apply mathematical or verbal reasoning to logic problems. And I think that those are the kind of skills, know, credit to the exam that's been around for a long time, that can help you think in a different way when you're a leader. What are some of the ways that you think learning AI can help somebody as a leader? Because I think there's sort of this notion that you could end up using it as a crutch.

David Marchick
Okay, great question. So we start the first week of every program, whether you're an 18-year-old freshman or a 26-year-old MBA, a first-year student, we start by teaching what's wrong with AI. You can't use it as a substitute. Here are the biases. Here are the hallucinations they create. We teach all the problems first and the ethics.
And then we shift to how to use it appropriately. So, I mean, you can turn in a paper that's written by AI and you'll fail. Yeah. Okay. But you can use AI to make your paper better. Let me give you a couple examples that would be for social sciences. So when I was a first, when I was a freshman, I told you I was not a very good student. I didn't have a lot of confidence in my writing.
I had a hard time conceptualizing like topic sentences and then the structure of an essay to make an argument. AI can help with that. It can help you create topic sentences. It can help create a structure. And then as a writer, you can fill in the blanks. OK. That's an appropriate use of AI to help you create structure ideation. And then you have to write the essay. Another
example. My son did a graduate thesis. studied liberal, undergraduate thesis. He studied liberal arts and he had me look at it I went through his 50 or 60 pages.

Zach Fernebok
You're a good dad.

David Marchick
He had a couple things which were age appropriate writing challenges that I also had much later in life. So things like he used too many prepositions and he changed the present and past tense back and forth. And you learn in writing not to do that. Okay. But when you're 21, you're still learning. So I ran his thesis through an AI tool. And I basically said, give me all of the examples where he changes the prepositions. He has too many prepositions or there's a change in tense. And then I gave him the report. said, I'm not going to solve this for you, Zach, but here are all the problems. Go fix it. And I said to him, I don't care what you get on this, your thesis. He actually got an A, which made me, I guess I did care because it made me a crowd. But I said, I really care that when you write a memo when you're in work, when you're working, that you don't change your tenses from past to future, past to present, because then your boss is not going to think you're a strong writer. So you have to learn this. That's an appropriate use of AI. So we really infuse the appropriate uses of AI throughout our curriculum. And then we want to give them the tools to enhance their learning, not substitute for their learning. Yeah.

Zach Fernebok
I really like that example because I think it is something that could be easy for somebody to pass off. Like it's just the tense of my sentences. Like I'm just sending an email. But you are somebody who has a very successful career and when you were reading it, you noticed it. So there's no reason why you wouldn't notice it in a shorter email that was from a client or from a partner.

David Marchick
Correct. And again, like at Kogod, ultimately I do care what he got in his grade, but not that much. I mean, nobody asked me about my grades, but I wanted him to learn so that he can succeed in the workforce.

Zach Fernebok
You mentioned 11 labs earlier, and since you've mentioned that, because we talked about it a little bit last month, I've started playing around with it. And I wanted to know if there were any other AI tools that you're particularly interested in right now or been playing around with.

David Marchick
So I play around with a lot. I'm experimenting. So I have a erplexity account for my school, but then I pay for Gemini. I pay for ChatGPT. I pay for 11 Labs. I have various note-taking tools. I just downloaded something called Whisper, where you can orally communicate with your phone and then it turns into an email or presentation. I do a lot with Notebook LM. I think it's incredible. You can create podcasts. I'll give you another example that I'd use for my son. Sure. So he had his final exam and he turned in his thesis and the next day he had a job interview and he had to drive from Maine to Boston for his job interview. OK. So he called me and said I really haven't had enough. So I basically dropped a bunch of stuff into Notebook LM. And I said, create three or four podcasts on this company, on this subject. It created podcasts and he was able to listen to those podcasts from his drive from Maine to Boston to prepare for an interview. Because it gave him a tool and he could have done it in five minutes himself, but I just did it for him because I’m learning
I like Nano Banana. I like image creation. I'm experimenting all the time and new stuff's coming out all the time and I just play with it. And that's what we've tried to encourage both our faculty and our students to do is just play with it. Just learn. Just experiment. Because if you're a first year student coming in as a freshman or first year MBA, by the time you graduate, the AI tools are going to be different. And so we're not like a vocational trainer to say, here's how you use it. We're trying to teach them how to think about using AI effectively for whatever tool comes along in the future.

Zach Fernebok
Absolutely. A lot of the folks who listen to this podcast are ambitious young people in their early to mid 20s who are wondering what they should do with their life. And I really want to ask you, like, what is your pitch to them if they're considering business school? Why should they take the leap? Why should they make this transition unabashedly?

David Marchick
OK. So, I advise young people to find that Venn diagram overlap between what they like to do and what they're good at. So I love basketball. I love sports. I wasn't very good at it. I was on the bench in high school. So I'm not going to be an NBA player. I'm not actually a great quantitative person. Like if you asked me to do a model in Excel, even though I was at a private equity firm, I would not be that strong at it. I skipped that step and kind of came in.
What I found in my own career is that kind of Venn diagram overlap between leadership, communication, strategy, and then execution, really kind of process management. Business education can be transformational. I really encourage students to dive in without a preconceived view of what you want to do because it will change. And I also think that the most interesting careers people change what they do repeatedly. So your career has changed dramatically and several times and I could see that you love what you do. You know, in 10 years, will you be doing this? Probably not. You'll probably reinvent yourself. Yeah. So my career has been, I've had government, law, business, and now academia, and each time it's allowed me to reinvent myself. in my view, the value of a business degree is it gives you the quantitative and qualitative skills plus the communication, teamwork, analytical skills to do anything. And that gives you the ability to pivot several times throughout your lifetime, which not only can be lucrative and financially remunerative, but it can also be give you that psychic income because change and learning new things invigorates you. And so that's the way I, that's my pitch.

Zach Fernebok
I'm sold. Okay. I'm coming back.

David Marchick
Take the GMAT and go to business school.

Zach Fernebok
That's right. What's exciting coming up with Kogod this year? I mean, it's January, there's a lot of months left. What's going on?

David Marchick
So we have three or four things that I'm really excited about. AI, AI, AI, yeah. We decided a few years ago to really invest in three or four areas and try to be world class in each of them. And now that's paying off. So we got the award for the best program in AI, which is great. Our entrepreneurship program under Tommy White, I don't know if you dealt with him when you're here or you had him, it's taken off. We got a big philanthropic support from a fellow named Gary Veloric and his brother, Michael Veloric. And that allowed Tommy, who is exceptionally skilled, to have the resource to take off. And we were ranked number seven in entrepreneurship for schools of our size. Sustainability is a third area where we're, depending on the ranking, third or fourth. So in those three or four areas, we are really operating at the cutting edge and world class.
Then we're just seeing a few new programs. We have a new sports leadership program. I love sports, and I'm involved with the Baltimore Orioles—my former boss, David Rubenstein, had a small ownership stake. And so I've spent a lot of time talking to team owners and managers and learned that what they want is not a former
jock who loves football or basketball and wants to work there. They want business people that are good marketers, that are good in finance, good in accounting, and they're running a business.
We're really building a sports program that has the foundations of the fundamentals of business plus learning the business of sports, talent, entertainment, all of the aspects of sports. We have a new real estate program which will blend hospitality because Marriott and Hilton and Choice Hotels are based here so it's one of the most important hospitality centers in the world.
And then the other thing I'm really excited about is actually what we're doing for non-business students, and that's an AI. So I have a theory, which we'll play out over the next few years, that perhaps the most important thing we're doing for an AU as a whole is to give pre-med students and pre-law students and artists AI tools. So let me just play this out. If you want to be a doc, and you're 20 years old today, you will not practice medicine until eight or 10 years. Yeah, okay. By the time you start to practice medicine, AI will dominate healthcare. It's already starting, but by the time you're practicing, AI is gonna be your partner to read x-rays, to read MRIs, to help you with...both analysis and diagnosis and treatments. So my theory is that a student applying to med school today needs their STEM degree, their bio, their O chem. They need the labs, they need to have good grades. And then if you have AI either as a minor or as a badge or certificate, you're gonna be much more attractive for that med school because the med school will say, okay, this person has all of the...fundamentals that you need to go to med school plus AI. So I'm really excited about that. We had a class where we had theater people and PR and journalists, students, non-business students take a marketing and advertising class, which was very heavy in AI. None of them were quantitative people, and they made their own apps to develop social media content and monitor it.
And they came in thinking AI is the devil. It hurts the environment. It replaces humans. And they left being excited about how AI can help you become a better artist. Yeah. To market your art, to be a better communicator, to do everything.

Zach Fernebok
David, it's been a real pleasure meeting you and talking to you. And I can't wait to list all of the programs that Kogod offers, from the full-time MBA to, of course, the master's in marketing and everything else for folks who listen. And just... thank you very much!

David Marchick
Thank you for coming back to school, and I look forward to seeing this.