Tammy Haddad: Welcome to the Washington AI Network Podcast. I'm Tammy Haddad, the founder of the Washington AI Network. We bring together official Washington DC insiders, policymakers, and AI experts who are challenging, debating, and just trying to figure out the rules of the road for artificial intelligence. This AI revolution has been led by industry, and now academia is racing to train the next generation on AI. And right here in our own backyard, American University’s Kogod School of Business, is leading the pack. And if you don't believe me, look at the front page of the Wall Street Journal, or take it from Brad Smith, president of Microsoft, who said American is, quote, well ahead of universities around the world. And the man behind this important effort is my special guest today, David Marchick, the Dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University. He's a veteran of government leading the transition from Trump to Biden, and he previously served as COO of the U.S. International Development Finance Corporation during the first year of the Biden administration. He was also a key player at the Carlyle Group, the private equity giant. Dave, welcome.
David Marchick: Thank you very much. Thanks for having me, and thanks for your good work.
Haddad: Oh, my goodness. There is nothing more important than AI in Washington, and you brought all of that to academia. Tell us about your program.
Marchick: First of all, what happened is, I'm not an AI expert, but what I learned from my former partner, David Rubenstein, is to be a good listener. So we had two speakers last year at our school. One was the president of Google, and the CEO of Google has famously said that AI is going to be as profound as the invention of electricity or the discovery of fire. So I thought, okay, well, that's hyperbole. We know good marketers when we see them, but if it's one one thousandth of the truth, it's big. Then we had another CEO named Brett Wilson, who runs a venture capital firm that invests in AI. And a student who was a sophomore raised his hand at the forum and said, Mr. Wilson, am I going to be replaced by AI? And Brett 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 it. And so a bell went off in my head, and I said, we have to teach students AI. Most universities and high schools, their focus on AI is to stop it, to try to have students not use it because they think they're going to use it to cheat. Students are using it, and you can't stop it. So my view was to embrace it. And so what we did is we worked with our faculty. We gave a committee six weeks to come up with a plan, and we were one of the first schools in the country to integrate AI throughout our curriculum at the undergraduate and graduate level, in core courses and electives. And so we want every student that graduates our school to be fluent in AI and to have it on their resume to give them a comparative advantage.
Haddad: Well, this technology is unfolding right before us. How did you figure out what to do?
Marchick: So the technology, it's at a very early stage. And like Ted Leonsis said last week on your podcast, it's akin to where AOL was at the early start of the internet. So AI has been around forever, as Ted said, he learned about it in 1978. But it really has been available to the masses in the last year. And what will develop is a few giants, like a Google, Facebook, Microsoft, and then millions of applications.