September 25, 2025 • 16 mins
Three years ago, before artificial intelligence became part of the national consciousness, American University's Kogod School of Business embarked on a program to change its curriculum and infuse AI throughout its undergraduate and graduate courses. More than 90% of the faculty are now infusing AI into their classes, while every student gets a Perplexity Enterprise account when they being their studies at Kogod.
David Marchick, the Dean of American's B-School, discusses the growing role of artificial intelligence in high education. Dean Marchick speaks with Carol Massar and Tim Stenovec on Bloomberg Businessweek Daily.
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Speaker 1 (00:02):
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Well, we're thinking a lot about the FED this week.
It's dual mandate. That's intention right now as we start
to see cracks in the labor market, but inflation remains
sticky in some places. And of course the effect that AI,
Carol is going to have on the labor market, that's
going to make the Fed's job even more tricky and
perhaps our job even more tricky too.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
We have a great guest to talk about AI and
the labor force and preparing the next generations of labor
workers in terms of getting ready for the impact AI
will have. David Marchek is watching all of this closely.
He's dean of the co God School of Business at
American University. Three years ago he set out to become
the first AI first business school in the country. He
(00:51):
joins us here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. David,
great to have you here.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
With us, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Tell us take us back three years and what happened,
because we've been kind of assumed now is it two
and a half years with AI, but tell us what
happened three years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
So I'm not a techie person, but we had the
president of Google, Kent Walker, who basically said that AI
was going to be as profound as fire or electricity.
And I said, well, that seems like a strong statement,
but even if it's zero point one percent true, it's big.
Then we had a fellow named Brett Wilson, who's a
CEO of an AI venture capital firm, and a student
(01:27):
raised his hand and said, am I going to be
replaced by AI? And Brett said, you likely won't be
replaced by AI, but you could be replaced by someone
who knows AI if you don't. So at that moment,
I said, we need to infuse AI into everything we
do to prepare our students for an AI workforce. And
we've done that over the last three years.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So what does that actually look like in the classroom?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
So when you start at co God School of Business,
if you're an eighteen year old, the first day is
your undergrad and grad the first day of orientation, and
we tell you you're going to use AI every day.
Most students were prohibited from using AI in high school
but they did it anyway, So we want to teach
students how to use it properly. We actually start by
(02:12):
teaching what's wrong with AI before we teach them what's
right with AI, and then over the four years or
if you're getting an MBA, we want them to learn
how to underwrite an investment, how to do fundamental research,
how to develop a marketing plan, how to learn to negotiate,
all using AI because they'll be expected to use AI
in the workforce.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
That's what we keep hearing increasingly is the people who
know and understand how to use it as a tool
will really do well going forward. Okay, so talk to
us little bit more though about because I think one
of the things that we're playing around with David is
that we use it too and then it's like okay,
but then we kind of check it out because we
(02:54):
just don't totally trust all of it. So tell us
how you guys teach that aspect of it, like what
to trust, what not to how do you fact check
some of this information that comes across.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Still, so we have a professor Ed Walsall who teaches
advanced Data Management data analytics. His whole class is used
to show how AI comes up with wrong answers incorrect information.
So he as students analyze data sets, come up with
predictive analytics, and he shows that AI makes mistakes all
the time. That's as valuable as learning what's right with AI.
(03:28):
So AI can be a powerful tool, but you need
to be skeptical. You need to test it, you need
to probe, and you need to be able to shape
it to produce the right answers.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
You know, I want to talk about your background a
little bit and then talk more about AI and perhaps
why you approach it this way. You have a really
interesting background a lawyer. You served in the Clinton and
Biden administrations in very different capacities. You did more than
a dozen years as a managing director and member of
the management committee at Carlisle. You've written a book, a
co author to book on presidential transition transitions. You don't
(04:00):
have the traditional background of a dean, like traditional academic
background of a dean.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I also had poor grades and was not the best student.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
That wasn't in the bio that I wrote. But I'm
glad you're bringing us that color. How does that perhaps
make you think differently about the workforce and what they
need to be prepared to do once they leave the
academic world.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So I had the best boss ever who actually hosts
a show at Bloomberg, David Rubinstein. David also was probably
the least likely person to run a private equity firm,
he had no private equity background. What I learned from
David is surround yourself with people that are better and
smarter than you in each of their areas and empower them,
(04:42):
and you can do anything. So what we're basically focused
on is ensuring that our students are prepared for the
AI workforce, the AI economy, which is changing rapidly. Stanford
just put out a study that shows that AI exposed
jobs for twenty two to twenty five year old are
shrinking between thirteen and twenty percent.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
It's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
It's a very hard time. My daughter graduated last year,
it was very hard for her to get a job.
We see it every day, and so what we're trying
to do is make sure that our students have a
leg up when they apply for jobs, which means you
need to have the fundamentals of a business education, marketing, accounting, management, finance,
(05:24):
et cetera, plus know how to use AI and everything
you do. And we're also doubling down on what used
to be considered soft skills communication, teamwork, the ability to
think on your feet. Those skills are more important today
than in an AI economy. Look at your jobs. You
have to think on your feet every day, react to news.
(05:46):
From times it works, sometimes it doesn't, just but having
an entrepreneur mindset and being able to think and create
is essential for today's economy.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
How do you, as an educator but also somebody from
the business world think about how important it is? Though?
When somebody their first couple of jobs or their first
job at they're learning so much. The learning curve is
so much, but it teaches their brain to think in
maybe different ways that they maybe didn't get when they
were at university or at college. And so I'm just wondering, like,
(06:17):
are we cutting that out of younger generations, that ability
to mess up learn I learned so much from mistakes
I made in kind of my first couple of jobs,
and I'm just wondering, are we getting rid of that?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
So I think we are getting rid at in some
ways because AI will replace some jobs. And my view
was incumbent on universities and educational institutions to be able
to foresee that and to give students the skills that
you may have learned in your first job. We're trying
to give them those skills at the university through in
(06:51):
classroom and out of classroom experiences. So we have a
lot of competitions for students to learn how to pitch,
where they have to answer questions on their feet. We
have investment clubs where students are investing actual money and
they need to present and defend and investment ideas. The
ability to give a pitch, to communicate orally to work
(07:12):
in teams is as important as.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Ever, how do you have to think about the admissions
process differently as a result of what happens now or
what you want to have happened in a school right now.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Traditionally, and maybe this is why I wasn't a great student,
a teacher stands in front of a classroom and communicates,
disseminates information which a student absorbs, and then the student
is assessed on how good they are by how much
they can retain and regurgitate AI replaces all that you
can get any piece of information at your fingertips. So
(07:45):
now the best students are going to be ones that
are most curious, that have an entrepreneurial mindset. They're going
to be able to take risk, They're going to be
able to figure out stuff on their own, and so
we're looking for that in the admissions process.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
You know, it's funny, Karl and I talked about this
lot because one of the things that we found these
lms are so good at is if you prompt it properly,
it can essentially write you a paper to answer question
and that a teacher. I mean, I'm not giving anyone
any news here that they don't already know.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Who students start the way ahead of us, just ahead
of us here, I mean for me and somebody who
graduated from what like twenty ish years ago, this is
like kind of crazy.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
But I think back to my own experience in college.
I went to a liberal arts school and some of
those aha moments that occurred for me were like late
at night when I was trying to write a term
paper or trying to write some sort of analysis of
a book I read, And those are the moments that
stuck with me. Those are the moments where I learned
how to make those connections. Do we lose the ability
to make those connections because of this technology, I.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Don't think so. I think it actually aids you. So
you were probably a better student than I was. But
when I was writing an essay, I had a hard
time figuring out topics, structuring an essay, structuring an argument.
AI can help you do that. It's a collaborator, and
so those aha moments are still there, they're just different. Also,
the ability to work in teams is going to be
(09:04):
much more important today than it was when we were
growing up. And I have students come to me all
the time and say, boy, this team work is hard.
This one student is a show off, this one doesn't
do their work, this one has views that I can't understand,
and they don't change. And I'm like, welcome to the
real world. I have that every day in my job,
(09:25):
and I've had it every day in my job for
the last forty years. So teaching students not only the
fundamental basic skills that you learn, reading, writing, reasoning, plus
AI skills and these soft skills, which I call power skills,
that's the future of education in my view.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
But are we also losing the ability of people kind
of struggling David through something and like maybe having to
work a little bit hard and understanding the idea that Okay,
maybe spend a little bit more time with it, dig
a little bit deeper, I don't know, look at some
different sources and like figure something out versus going like
I'm blown away by some of the stuff that you
get off of chat, GPT and other chatbots, if you will,
(10:08):
And I'm just kind of wondering, are we losing something?
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Maybe they're still struggling. But let's say I were a
twenty two year old and I wanted to be your
research assistant. You would expect me to be able to
find any piece of information at my fingertips any day
and deliver it to you. You'd expect me to have
much more advanced skills today than if I were applying
twenty years ago or in my case, forty years ago.
(10:34):
So it's just a different type of struggle, and the
students today need to learn how to do the stuff
that's required in an AI economy.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Can I ask you about teachers how they had to
rethink how they teach, because that's something you guys have
had to deal with as well.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That is a great question. Faculty traditionally are very resistant
to change. We have faculty that have taught the same
thing over and over again. For We've actually created a
very entrepreneurial culture among our faculty. Where we started with
a few early adopters, then we had some others that
we dragged along. Today, ninety percent of our faculty are
infusing AI in their classroom. At the end of the
(11:10):
spring semester, it was fifty. So over the summer there
was just a cultural change where everybody said, the parade's leaving.
Either need to get in front of it or I'm
going to be left behind.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
We're speaking right now with David Marchek. He's the dean
of the co god A School of a Business at
American University. He's also formerly of the Carlisle Group and
served in the Clinton and Biden administrations. Just a headline
crossing the Bloomberg terminal, Carol, as you mentioned, President Trump
said the US struck a second vessel faring drugs from Venezuela,
(11:41):
showing his determination to proceed with an aggressive strategy that's
ratcheted up tensions with the country and prompted questions about
its legality. We're monitoring his story for developments. We'll let
you know if President Trump makes any comments on it.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
So what do you think David is constructive for we
as communicators and having guests and we're talking about A
I feel like every station somehow, you know, all roads
lead back to AI.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Are you trying to get him to give us advice
about how we AI prove ourselves? No, No, because I
would be open to that too.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Just thinking about the smart way to deal with it,
because I think it's really easy to get caught up
in the exuberance around it.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
There's so much spending.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
That's going on, and we're trying to like we even
today did kind of a reality check about where we
are in AI.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Like it's kind of a wild world where we're talking
about two hundred million dollar salaries for people who are
poached and brought to meta platforms for specific technology.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Just trying to understand what do you think is constructive
based on kind of the experience you have had reorienting
your approaches there.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
So I think what we're seeing is a technology revolution
in a much more abbreviated version than we've seen it before.
It's the fastest technology ever to be adopted. So chat
GPT has acquired the same number of users they you know,
five times as fast as Netflix or Amazon, twenty times
as fast as Facebook. So when the mobile revolution took place,
(13:00):
which we all live through, it took thirty years for
us to really use the phone for everything. AI is
changing that in a matter of months. So I do
think this is a transformational change that we're seeing. It's
going to change everything in the economy faster than any
technology change that ever has happened to Do.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
You think we know if yet it's good for the economy.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I don't think we know. I think there's big pluses
and I think there's big minuses. My view is that
there will be winners and losers, and my focus is
taking care of the students that are at my school
to help them prepare.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Well, let's talk a little bit about the outcomes that
you've seen thus far. You're really still early into this experiment.
Three years ago, as Carol mentioned, was when you set
out to become the first AI first business school in
the country. What can you tell us about graduates who
are finding full time employment on the undergrad side, then
also on the NBA side.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's helping them. It's helping them have a leg up
in me be more competitive. One of the things I'm
most excited about this year is we're offering an AI
I'M minor to non business schools. So let's say you're
a student that wants to go to med school. You've
done to what traditionally a student does, takeing a biodegree,
you have some labs, you're applying to med school. If
you have an AI minor, you're going to be much
(14:12):
more attractive because AI is going to transform healthcare more
than perhaps any other field. If you want to be
a policy major and go work for a United States Senator,
and that senator the chief of staff says, Okay, you're
a policy major from a good school and you have
an AI minor, I know you're going to be able
to do research for me, for any hearing, for any questions,
(14:33):
for anything I need to know much faster, and you're
going to be able to analyze data much better than others.
So I think it's a huge leg up for both
business students and non business students.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Do you ever envision a class where it's just someone
talking to you like chat, GPT or whatever version might
ultimately come out, like you just think about the we
always talk about a great conversation, how much we can
learn if you need to ask the right questions. But
I think about that back and forth.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I think duelingo CEO has said that AI could replace teachers.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
AI could dis intermediate the whole education system. Okay, and
we're experimenting. I'll give you an example. We have a
professor named Tommy White. He runs our entrepreneurship program. He's incredible,
one of those popular professors. He created a class this
year using all AI to create the class. It has
no books, no reading. The only assignments are prompts, prompts
(15:30):
plus teamwork. We'll see how it goes. Will it work,
I don't know, but we're trying so maybe so maybe.
I mean, we're experimenting. And that's one of the things
that we've done to create this AI first culture is
we've told our faculty it's okay to fail because nobody
really knows what's going on or what we're doing because
it's so new. So try something it doesn't work, try
(15:51):
something else, really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Hopefully you'll find some time to come back to us
and can with conversation love love. Maybe we talked to
some students at some point.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
That'd be great. We have some incredible students.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah, I think that would be a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Get on the road, go to d I'm happy to
do that.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Come teach a class, try that good stuff. Thank you, David,
Thanks nying.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Really appreciate David Marcheck. He is the dean of the
co God School of Business at American University. Really fascinating conversation.
If you missed any of it, please be sure to
check out our podcast. You can download it a little
bit later.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Off
Bloomberg Audio Studios, Podcasts, Radio News.
Speaker 2 (00:07):
You're listening to Bloomberg Business Week with Carol Masser and
Tim Steneveek on Bloomberg Radio.
Speaker 3 (00:14):
Well, we're thinking a lot about the FED this week.
It's dual mandate. That's intention right now as we start
to see cracks in the labor market, but inflation remains
sticky in some places. And of course the effect that AI,
Carol is going to have on the labor market, that's
going to make the Fed's job even more tricky and
perhaps our job even more tricky too.
Speaker 1 (00:30):
We have a great guest to talk about AI and
the labor force and preparing the next generations of labor
workers in terms of getting ready for the impact AI
will have. David Marchek is watching all of this closely.
He's dean of the co God School of Business at
American University. Three years ago he set out to become
the first AI first business school in the country. He
(00:51):
joins us here in our Bloomberg Interactive Brokers studio. David,
great to have you here.
Speaker 2 (00:55):
With us, Thanks for having me.
Speaker 1 (00:57):
Tell us take us back three years and what happened,
because we've been kind of assumed now is it two
and a half years with AI, but tell us what
happened three years ago.
Speaker 2 (01:05):
So I'm not a techie person, but we had the
president of Google, Kent Walker, who basically said that AI
was going to be as profound as fire or electricity.
And I said, well, that seems like a strong statement,
but even if it's zero point one percent true, it's big.
Then we had a fellow named Brett Wilson, who's a
CEO of an AI venture capital firm, and a student
(01:27):
raised his hand and said, am I going to be
replaced by AI? And Brett said, you likely won't be
replaced by AI, but you could be replaced by someone
who knows AI if you don't. So at that moment,
I said, we need to infuse AI into everything we
do to prepare our students for an AI workforce. And
we've done that over the last three years.
Speaker 3 (01:47):
So what does that actually look like in the classroom?
Speaker 2 (01:50):
So when you start at co God School of Business,
if you're an eighteen year old, the first day is
your undergrad and grad the first day of orientation, and
we tell you you're going to use AI every day.
Most students were prohibited from using AI in high school
but they did it anyway, So we want to teach
students how to use it properly. We actually start by
(02:12):
teaching what's wrong with AI before we teach them what's
right with AI, and then over the four years or
if you're getting an MBA, we want them to learn
how to underwrite an investment, how to do fundamental research,
how to develop a marketing plan, how to learn to negotiate,
all using AI because they'll be expected to use AI
in the workforce.
Speaker 1 (02:32):
That's what we keep hearing increasingly is the people who
know and understand how to use it as a tool
will really do well going forward. Okay, so talk to
us little bit more though about because I think one
of the things that we're playing around with David is
that we use it too and then it's like okay,
but then we kind of check it out because we
(02:54):
just don't totally trust all of it. So tell us
how you guys teach that aspect of it, like what
to trust, what not to how do you fact check
some of this information that comes across.
Speaker 2 (03:05):
Still, so we have a professor Ed Walsall who teaches
advanced Data Management data analytics. His whole class is used
to show how AI comes up with wrong answers incorrect information.
So he as students analyze data sets, come up with
predictive analytics, and he shows that AI makes mistakes all
the time. That's as valuable as learning what's right with AI.
(03:28):
So AI can be a powerful tool, but you need
to be skeptical. You need to test it, you need
to probe, and you need to be able to shape
it to produce the right answers.
Speaker 3 (03:38):
You know, I want to talk about your background a
little bit and then talk more about AI and perhaps
why you approach it this way. You have a really
interesting background a lawyer. You served in the Clinton and
Biden administrations in very different capacities. You did more than
a dozen years as a managing director and member of
the management committee at Carlisle. You've written a book, a
co author to book on presidential transition transitions. You don't
(04:00):
have the traditional background of a dean, like traditional academic
background of a dean.
Speaker 2 (04:05):
I also had poor grades and was not the best student.
Speaker 3 (04:08):
That wasn't in the bio that I wrote. But I'm
glad you're bringing us that color. How does that perhaps
make you think differently about the workforce and what they
need to be prepared to do once they leave the
academic world.
Speaker 2 (04:22):
So I had the best boss ever who actually hosts
a show at Bloomberg, David Rubinstein. David also was probably
the least likely person to run a private equity firm,
he had no private equity background. What I learned from
David is surround yourself with people that are better and
smarter than you in each of their areas and empower them,
(04:42):
and you can do anything. So what we're basically focused
on is ensuring that our students are prepared for the
AI workforce, the AI economy, which is changing rapidly. Stanford
just put out a study that shows that AI exposed
jobs for twenty two to twenty five year old are
shrinking between thirteen and twenty percent.
Speaker 1 (05:03):
It's terrifying.
Speaker 2 (05:04):
It's a very hard time. My daughter graduated last year,
it was very hard for her to get a job.
We see it every day, and so what we're trying
to do is make sure that our students have a
leg up when they apply for jobs, which means you
need to have the fundamentals of a business education, marketing, accounting, management, finance,
(05:24):
et cetera, plus know how to use AI and everything
you do. And we're also doubling down on what used
to be considered soft skills communication, teamwork, the ability to
think on your feet. Those skills are more important today
than in an AI economy. Look at your jobs. You
have to think on your feet every day, react to news.
(05:46):
From times it works, sometimes it doesn't, just but having
an entrepreneur mindset and being able to think and create
is essential for today's economy.
Speaker 1 (05:55):
How do you, as an educator but also somebody from
the business world think about how important it is? Though?
When somebody their first couple of jobs or their first
job at they're learning so much. The learning curve is
so much, but it teaches their brain to think in
maybe different ways that they maybe didn't get when they
were at university or at college. And so I'm just wondering, like,
(06:17):
are we cutting that out of younger generations, that ability
to mess up learn I learned so much from mistakes
I made in kind of my first couple of jobs,
and I'm just wondering, are we getting rid of that?
Speaker 2 (06:30):
So I think we are getting rid at in some
ways because AI will replace some jobs. And my view
was incumbent on universities and educational institutions to be able
to foresee that and to give students the skills that
you may have learned in your first job. We're trying
to give them those skills at the university through in
(06:51):
classroom and out of classroom experiences. So we have a
lot of competitions for students to learn how to pitch,
where they have to answer questions on their feet. We
have investment clubs where students are investing actual money and
they need to present and defend and investment ideas. The
ability to give a pitch, to communicate orally to work
(07:12):
in teams is as important as.
Speaker 3 (07:13):
Ever, how do you have to think about the admissions
process differently as a result of what happens now or
what you want to have happened in a school right now.
Speaker 2 (07:23):
Traditionally, and maybe this is why I wasn't a great student,
a teacher stands in front of a classroom and communicates,
disseminates information which a student absorbs, and then the student
is assessed on how good they are by how much
they can retain and regurgitate AI replaces all that you
can get any piece of information at your fingertips. So
(07:45):
now the best students are going to be ones that
are most curious, that have an entrepreneurial mindset. They're going
to be able to take risk, They're going to be
able to figure out stuff on their own, and so
we're looking for that in the admissions process.
Speaker 3 (07:58):
You know, it's funny, Karl and I talked about this
lot because one of the things that we found these
lms are so good at is if you prompt it properly,
it can essentially write you a paper to answer question
and that a teacher. I mean, I'm not giving anyone
any news here that they don't already know.
Speaker 2 (08:12):
Who students start the way ahead of us, just ahead
of us here, I mean for me and somebody who
graduated from what like twenty ish years ago, this is
like kind of crazy.
Speaker 3 (08:22):
But I think back to my own experience in college.
I went to a liberal arts school and some of
those aha moments that occurred for me were like late
at night when I was trying to write a term
paper or trying to write some sort of analysis of
a book I read, And those are the moments that
stuck with me. Those are the moments where I learned
how to make those connections. Do we lose the ability
to make those connections because of this technology, I.
Speaker 2 (08:43):
Don't think so. I think it actually aids you. So
you were probably a better student than I was. But
when I was writing an essay, I had a hard
time figuring out topics, structuring an essay, structuring an argument.
AI can help you do that. It's a collaborator, and
so those aha moments are still there, they're just different. Also,
the ability to work in teams is going to be
(09:04):
much more important today than it was when we were
growing up. And I have students come to me all
the time and say, boy, this team work is hard.
This one student is a show off, this one doesn't
do their work, this one has views that I can't understand,
and they don't change. And I'm like, welcome to the
real world. I have that every day in my job,
(09:25):
and I've had it every day in my job for
the last forty years. So teaching students not only the
fundamental basic skills that you learn, reading, writing, reasoning, plus
AI skills and these soft skills, which I call power skills,
that's the future of education in my view.
Speaker 1 (09:43):
But are we also losing the ability of people kind
of struggling David through something and like maybe having to
work a little bit hard and understanding the idea that Okay,
maybe spend a little bit more time with it, dig
a little bit deeper, I don't know, look at some
different sources and like figure something out versus going like
I'm blown away by some of the stuff that you
get off of chat, GPT and other chatbots, if you will,
(10:08):
And I'm just kind of wondering, are we losing something?
Speaker 2 (10:11):
Maybe they're still struggling. But let's say I were a
twenty two year old and I wanted to be your
research assistant. You would expect me to be able to
find any piece of information at my fingertips any day
and deliver it to you. You'd expect me to have
much more advanced skills today than if I were applying
twenty years ago or in my case, forty years ago.
(10:34):
So it's just a different type of struggle, and the
students today need to learn how to do the stuff
that's required in an AI economy.
Speaker 1 (10:42):
Can I ask you about teachers how they had to
rethink how they teach, because that's something you guys have
had to deal with as well.
Speaker 2 (10:47):
That is a great question. Faculty traditionally are very resistant
to change. We have faculty that have taught the same
thing over and over again. For We've actually created a
very entrepreneurial culture among our faculty. Where we started with
a few early adopters, then we had some others that
we dragged along. Today, ninety percent of our faculty are
infusing AI in their classroom. At the end of the
(11:10):
spring semester, it was fifty. So over the summer there
was just a cultural change where everybody said, the parade's leaving.
Either need to get in front of it or I'm
going to be left behind.
Speaker 3 (11:20):
We're speaking right now with David Marchek. He's the dean
of the co god A School of a Business at
American University. He's also formerly of the Carlisle Group and
served in the Clinton and Biden administrations. Just a headline
crossing the Bloomberg terminal, Carol, as you mentioned, President Trump
said the US struck a second vessel faring drugs from Venezuela,
(11:41):
showing his determination to proceed with an aggressive strategy that's
ratcheted up tensions with the country and prompted questions about
its legality. We're monitoring his story for developments. We'll let
you know if President Trump makes any comments on it.
Speaker 1 (11:53):
So what do you think David is constructive for we
as communicators and having guests and we're talking about A
I feel like every station somehow, you know, all roads
lead back to AI.
Speaker 3 (12:02):
Are you trying to get him to give us advice
about how we AI prove ourselves? No, No, because I
would be open to that too.
Speaker 1 (12:08):
Just thinking about the smart way to deal with it,
because I think it's really easy to get caught up
in the exuberance around it.
Speaker 2 (12:14):
There's so much spending.
Speaker 1 (12:15):
That's going on, and we're trying to like we even
today did kind of a reality check about where we
are in AI.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
Like it's kind of a wild world where we're talking
about two hundred million dollar salaries for people who are
poached and brought to meta platforms for specific technology.
Speaker 1 (12:28):
Just trying to understand what do you think is constructive
based on kind of the experience you have had reorienting
your approaches there.
Speaker 2 (12:36):
So I think what we're seeing is a technology revolution
in a much more abbreviated version than we've seen it before.
It's the fastest technology ever to be adopted. So chat
GPT has acquired the same number of users they you know,
five times as fast as Netflix or Amazon, twenty times
as fast as Facebook. So when the mobile revolution took place,
(13:00):
which we all live through, it took thirty years for
us to really use the phone for everything. AI is
changing that in a matter of months. So I do
think this is a transformational change that we're seeing. It's
going to change everything in the economy faster than any
technology change that ever has happened to Do.
Speaker 1 (13:18):
You think we know if yet it's good for the economy.
Speaker 2 (13:20):
I don't think we know. I think there's big pluses
and I think there's big minuses. My view is that
there will be winners and losers, and my focus is
taking care of the students that are at my school
to help them prepare.
Speaker 3 (13:33):
Well, let's talk a little bit about the outcomes that
you've seen thus far. You're really still early into this experiment.
Three years ago, as Carol mentioned, was when you set
out to become the first AI first business school in
the country. What can you tell us about graduates who
are finding full time employment on the undergrad side, then
also on the NBA side.
Speaker 2 (13:51):
It's helping them. It's helping them have a leg up
in me be more competitive. One of the things I'm
most excited about this year is we're offering an AI
I'M minor to non business schools. So let's say you're
a student that wants to go to med school. You've
done to what traditionally a student does, takeing a biodegree,
you have some labs, you're applying to med school. If
you have an AI minor, you're going to be much
(14:12):
more attractive because AI is going to transform healthcare more
than perhaps any other field. If you want to be
a policy major and go work for a United States Senator,
and that senator the chief of staff says, Okay, you're
a policy major from a good school and you have
an AI minor, I know you're going to be able
to do research for me, for any hearing, for any questions,
(14:33):
for anything I need to know much faster, and you're
going to be able to analyze data much better than others.
So I think it's a huge leg up for both
business students and non business students.
Speaker 1 (14:45):
Do you ever envision a class where it's just someone
talking to you like chat, GPT or whatever version might
ultimately come out, like you just think about the we
always talk about a great conversation, how much we can
learn if you need to ask the right questions. But
I think about that back and forth.
Speaker 3 (15:00):
I think duelingo CEO has said that AI could replace teachers.
Speaker 2 (15:05):
AI could dis intermediate the whole education system. Okay, and
we're experimenting. I'll give you an example. We have a
professor named Tommy White. He runs our entrepreneurship program. He's incredible,
one of those popular professors. He created a class this
year using all AI to create the class. It has
no books, no reading. The only assignments are prompts, prompts
(15:30):
plus teamwork. We'll see how it goes. Will it work,
I don't know, but we're trying so maybe so maybe.
I mean, we're experimenting. And that's one of the things
that we've done to create this AI first culture is
we've told our faculty it's okay to fail because nobody
really knows what's going on or what we're doing because
it's so new. So try something it doesn't work, try
(15:51):
something else, really interesting stuff.
Speaker 1 (15:54):
Hopefully you'll find some time to come back to us
and can with conversation love love. Maybe we talked to
some students at some point.
Speaker 2 (16:00):
That'd be great. We have some incredible students.
Speaker 1 (16:02):
Yeah, I think that would be a lot of fun.
Speaker 3 (16:04):
Get on the road, go to d I'm happy to
do that.
Speaker 2 (16:08):
Come teach a class, try that good stuff. Thank you, David,
Thanks nying.
Speaker 1 (16:13):
Really appreciate David Marcheck. He is the dean of the
co God School of Business at American University. Really fascinating conversation.
If you missed any of it, please be sure to
check out our podcast. You can download it a little
bit later.
Speaker 2 (16:24):
Off
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Tim Stenovec
Carol Massar
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