Jeff Wilser: Hello, and welcome to AI-Curious. My name is Jeff Wilser. I'm a journalist, I'm a human and I am curious about AI and I'm certainly curious about AI and education. One of the most fascinating topics in that it's really easy to imagine how they can go either way. There's the obvious concern of, "oh no, AI is gonna let kids take shortcuts and cheat and they'll never do work again," but there are also plenty of professors and academics who are intrigued about the educational potential of AI and how AI can help spark and spur learning and also how AI is an important topic and tool that should be taught. I've had some listener feedback requesting this topic and it also feels super timely and topical. Just a couple weeks ago, there was a big splashy story in the Wall Street Journal titled "Business Schools Are Going All In on AI," and arguably the key player in that story is American University's Kogod School of Business which has aggressively and quickly and emphatically leapt into incorporating AI into its curriculum. They are kind of moving at warp speed for academia and are this fall injecting over 20 classes that have AI in them in some capacity. So I am delighted that the two central figures of that story are today's guests on the pod. They are the very tip of the spear of AI and education. That would be David Marchick, the Dean of Kogod School of Business who kicked off and oversaw this larger initiative, and Professor Angela Virtu, the AI and tech savvy faculty member who is really in the trenches helping to shape the curriculum.
So Professor Virtu and Dean Marchick plan on teaching AI again in over twenty classes next year, which is kind of a staggering quick shift, and not just tech and IT and coding classes but the usual staples of business like marketing, accounting, finance. So what does that mean exactly? Like how does it work? How would a school's curriculum change? Are we talking about using AI to teach marketing or teaching how marketing changes with AI? The answer is kind of yes and yes. The Dean, Professor and I get into all of that and we also of course tackle the question everyone has about AI education: cheating. What's a solution there? Is it even a problem? So we cover AI and education from a ton of different angles and I very much enjoyed the conversation, and frankly I am fascinated with this experiment. They are truly being forward thinking and taking a pretty big swing here regardless of your thoughts on AI. I think you have to admire the willingness to take some chances and shake things up and incorporate and test out this new technology. It's exciting stuff.
So, with that said, please enjoy my conversation with American University's Kogod School of Business Dean Dave Marchick and Professor Angela Virtu. Dave, Angela, welcome to the pod.
Angela Virtu: Thanks for having us.
David Marchick: First of all, thanks for having us. I know that this podcast is one of the best around on AI and Inc. Magazine rated it as one of the top podcasts, so we're thrilled to be here. We have speakers all the time at American University. We've had around thirty CEOs in the last two years and there were a few speakers that really got me thinking about AI. I'm not a tech person—Angela will forget more about AI than I'll ever learn—but we had the president of Google, Kent Walker, come and he cited his boss saying that AI is going to be more profound than electricity or fire. And I thought that's a bit of hyperbole, but let's say it's like 10% true, that's still pretty big. Then we had a CEO named Brett Wilson come. Brett is a venture capitalist who invests in AI and a student asked him, will my job be replaced by AI? And Brett said your job will not be replaced by AI, but your job could be replaced by someone who knows AI if you don't know AI. And then there's a young woman that I've kind of mentored who is in the financial industry, 26 years old, and she once said to me, we're using AI to do essentially what I did when I was 22. So I basically said we have to run, not walk, to get AI into our curriculum so that our students know the tools of AI when they apply for jobs, when they enter the workforce, so they can be competitive and so they're the ones that know AI and they're not the ones that are replaced by people that know AI.
Wilser: I love that. Before we dive into the particulars of what you did with AI education, Angela, what brought you into the AI world and what excited you about the idea of injecting AI into a school setting?
Virtu: So I am definitely the tech side of the house. I'm a total nerd, total geek—you name it, that fits the bill on my end. You're in the right place. Yeah. So for me, whenever I see new tech, I always kind of try to sniff it out a little bit. I feel like it's a little overhyped. Is this the real deal? Where are we at? And I'm always leaning more towards the side of pessimism, to be brutally honest. I'm always like, yeah, it doesn't really sound great. It seems more marketing than what the tech actually can kind of withstand. And I guess back when OpenAI really released their ChatGPT model to the public and I was kind of poking around and starting to play with it, I was like, okay, this is interesting. At the time I was still in industry and our CEO was already like, all right, what do we do with this? How do we put this in the product? Let's go, go, go. And as soon as I knew that industry was moving that fast, everything else was going to follow. So I'm just super excited that we're at the forefront here, we're getting this integrated because, you know, all of my partners in industry still are like, we're already doing this, right? So it's super cool.
Marchick: The amazing thing is, academia usually moves at a glacial pace, and here, we showed that we can move fast. And that's one of the things that I'm most proud of. Again, Angela is really tech savvy—I joke that I just got Pong—but we drove the process with experts like Professor Virtu.