In this page, Prof. Rama Ramakrishnan describes how he seeks to prepare students for a business landscape that is being radically transformed by advances in AI.
It’s really important for students to understand how AI works at a fairly detailed level. They don’t necessarily have to get into the technical weeds, but they do need to have a clear understanding of what the big pieces are and how they interact and so on. This gives them the right mental model to make the right decisions about how to use them. I and others have created a lot of material online to make this easy.
I tell my students to experiment “indiscriminately” with LLMs and agents for their own work and practice daily. If they do this, they will be surprised at what these tools can do. They will also be surprised by where they fall short. Researchers call this the “Jagged Frontier,” and it’s really important to understand and get a feel for this.
In parallel with keeping up and using these tools, I also caution my students to make sure that they don’t gradually outsource much of their thinking to these tools and thereby lose the ability for deep work, for deep concentration over time. In particular, I encourage them to not use these tools to write drafts of whatever they have in mind, but instead to write the draft themselves and then use these tools to surgically fix awkward sentences, etc. I also encourage them to continue to read long-form content by themselves rather than having these tools just summarize everything for them.
