Amir Bormand: On this episode of the show, I have with me David Marchick. He is the Dean of the Kogod School of Business at American University. We're to be talking about preparing to work in an AI infused world and David's going to walk us through what's happening within his world with AI. Lots of education is changing and well, obviously you can avoid it, which a lot of schools are trying to, or you can embrace and David's going to talk us through and walk us through what that means for him and the university. We're going to learn a little bit about how that teachers are actually starting to incorporate AI within their teachings and working with it versus against it. David, thanks for joining me. I'm excited to see how much we can cover here. Absolutely. All right. So I guess we're going to be talking about really the educational system and AI in this case, obviously American University, you're the dean of the school of business. I guess, tell us a little bit about before we dive into where, where you have been headed, heading, tell us a little bit about just traditionally the view of, you know, where these AIs, these GenAI tools have been seen by schools. Obviously they've come on the scene the last couple of years. So tell us how the traditional view has been of these technologies.
David Marchick: Well, when AI jumped into the national consciousness, AI has been around forever, as you've covered on your podcast. I've listened to a number of episodes. So AI, machine learning, it's been around for a long time. But really, it's been in the public consciousness for a year and a half since ChatGPT went wild. And the initial reaction in academia at all levels, high school, college, grad schools, et cetera, was how do we stop this so students don't cheat? What rules can we put in place to block it? And how do we prohibit it? And many schools, high schools, universities, grad schools, law schools are still taking that approach. I have deans from all over the country calling me and college presidents saying our policy is no AI. Okay. The data shows that pretty much everybody aged fifteen to twenty is using AI. So you can't stop it. It's kind of like telling students not to listen to music. What we've done is embrace it under the view that anybody that's Gen Z that goes into the workplace, whether they're twenty-two and getting their first job out of college or they're thirty having got received an MBA or a law degree or a joint degree, their employers are going to expect them to use it. And it actually clicked in with us when we had a speaker named Brett Wilson speak at our school about two years ago. He's the CEO of a company called Swift Ventures, which is a venture capital firm, San Francisco, invests in AI. And a sophomore raised his hand and said, am I going to be replaced by AI? And the room kind of fell silent. And Brett said, you won't be replaced by AI, but you could be replaced by someone who knows AI if you don't. And at that moment, I said, we have to infuse AI into everything we do. And our faculty responded very, very quickly in an impressive way.
Bormand: Fantastic. mean, obviously we do hear about it. I think I mentioned to you previously, my daughter's school, she's still in lower school. So not at the university level, but they restrict it heavily. But also we know almost every kid somehow figures a way of using ChatGPT. It is inevitable. I guess when you heard this, a little bit of an epiphany of shifting gears to bringing AI in, you said the faculty was super supportive. What does that mean from an educational framework? And the reason I ask that is we've have hundreds of years of educational system built upon the student doing all the heavy lifting, regardless of how tedious and how monotonous it might be, but we do it all. I guess that shift to something where you're asking the faculty to bring in those AI tools that they previously not worked with or potentially had incorporated within their educational curriculum. What kind of shift is that? Like how big of a shift is that?
Marchick: It's a huge transformational shift. In our lifetimes, the personal, well, I'm older than you, but the personal computer was invented. I liken it to kind of a math teacher when calculators became ubiquitous and cheap. And a math teacher saying to a student, don't use a calculator because you're not going to learn math. You're not going to learn addition. You're not going to learn multiplication. A student needs to learn the basics. They need to learn math. But a calculator now is a ubiquitous tool. know, spelling. Okay, when I was in grade school, I had spelling tests and spelling words all up through really high school, studying for the SAT. I'm probably a much worse speller today than I was when I was seventeen because the computer fixes my spelling. I type it and I just run spell check and it fixes it. So those are small changes in our behavior and the way we learn and the way that we teach. AI is like a giant asteroid hitting earth and changing education in a very, very transformational way. if universities can't move with speed, we will be disintermediated. The basic function of learning, knowledge accumulation, access to learning anything is changing. Even coding, which is a very sophisticated part of what we teach, is changing because Google and Anthropic and firms all over the country are reporting that forty, sixty, eighty percent of the code that's being written is actually being written by AI as opposed to programmers. So the whole way universities teach computer science is about to be revolutionized.
Bormand: You were to look at traditionally we've asked students to come up with original work. You know, there's, there's, there's, you know, plagiarism tools, there's ethics tools, all these different tools to keep people from borrowing, others' ideas. I guess with the tool that's generative in nature, that barrier is very much gone. I mean, you could pretty much ask an AI to write in any voice tone, make adjustments to your heart's content. How does the educational system balance that? Because obviously you still want something from the student, you still want them to learn, but there is a component of how much of that will be original. I guess that might be more art than science, but how do you view that? How does the educational system support that?
Marchick: So it's a great question. I would say we're still figuring it out. ⁓ Nobody really knows the answer. One of the things we've tried to do at our business school, which has created a culture of experimentation, is to say, hey, we're making this up as we go along. Faculty for decades, for millennium, have basically said, I'm the expert. I studied this. I got a PhD. I'm the expert on this. And my job is to share my knowledge with you. With AI and the infusion of AI, we're all making it up as we go along. So it's interesting. And we're learning and we're adjusting and we're making mistakes all the time, which is fine. And we're telling students, hey, we're making this up as we go along and we're learning and we're adjusting and we're making mistakes all the time. The first thing we do in orientation and our kind of Business 101 class—the freshman first semester, first year class—is we teach students to question AI. Question the accuracy, question the output, and question the process that AI goes through.