A group of technology and business leaders positioned artificial intelligence (AI) as a crucial advancement that can pair with human ingenuity during an Oct. 3 Georgetown University McDonough School of Business AI and Work Summit.
The summit included speakers from companies including Amazon, Microsoft, Google Cloud, Morgan Stanley, Apollo Global Management and AG Consulting Partners to explore the future of business, finance careers and quantum computing amid AI developments. In light of rising student concerns about AI’s dominance, these financial and business leaders encouraged collaboration with AI rather than shying from it.
Alex Goldenberg (SFS ’98), AG Consulting Partners’ president and managing partner, said the rapid development of AI is exciting because of its unprecedented evolution and potential for a bigger role in business.
“It reminds me of the early days of the idea of the iPhone and all the apps that were being built,” Goldenberg said at the summit. “Technology is so cool right now — everyone’s trying to build something just to play around with it. But over time, there’ll be a top tier 20% of agents that will prove to be useful, and the rest will be taken away.”
Goldenberg said AI implementation currently focuses on simplifying complex processes and maximizing return on investment (ROI) but will soon move to more advanced business models.
“Right now, everyone’s focusing on low-hanging fruit, automating complex processes; it’s all about ROI and adoption,” Goldenberg said. “But I think as we move forward, there’ll be new business models emerging. People are talking about billion-dollar companies run by one or two people and their agents.”
Mariam Naini, vice president of Microsoft’s commerce engineering customer engagement team, said Microsoft is in the process of using AI to improve customer experience using the Kaizen approach, a business model focused on incremental changes, and Gemba Walks, a management practice that identifies inefficiencies.
“At Microsoft, we’ve adopted the Kaizen approach, this kind of continuous improvement, and implementing Gemba Walks across all of our processes to understand where the inefficiencies are,” Naini said at the summit. “The first exercise is to understand what you need to stop doing. The second exercise is figuring out what you can hand off. And then the third is ‘agentifying’ what you’ve got left.”
AG Consulting Partners has also been using AI for customer service, including automating customer outreach, sales, scheduling and other manual processes, Goldenberg said.
He added that decision-making still requires the human mind, with which AI is only capable of assisting.
“While the technical skills are becoming super important, the business side of things is also critical,” Goldenberg said. “Building agents is one thing, but ensuring things like organizational alignment, cross-team collaboration and proper adoption is another. We become super important.”
Elizabeth Dennis, Morgan Stanley’s managing director and head of global client coverage, said human connection is an important part of financial asset management.
“It can cause a lot of disruption in families, even those that are quite high net worth,” Dennis said at the summit. “You’re talking about next generation planning and what to do with a family business or philanthropy and giving back. Those are mostly human, high-touch decisions.”
Roshanak Roshandel, Amazon’s head of Kuiper trust and privacy, said young graduates entering the workforce should see AI agents as assets, not competition.
“The important thing is to look at this as a tool,” Roshandel said at the summit. “Jobs are not going anywhere — they are changing. The skill sets that they require might be different. 25 years ago, everybody was learning HTML because they needed to put a web page together for their organization. You’re going to have to adapt and reinvent yourself.”
Mitra Azizirad, Microsoft’s chief operations officer and corporate vice president of strategic missions and technologies, said quantum computing, a new type of computing that utilizes quantum mechanics to exponentially accelerate data processing, has the potential to solve problems that would otherwise take years.
“If we just relied on classical computing and AI, we would not be able to solve these problems in 100 or 1000 years,” Azizirad said at the summit. “But with quantum, it will be a very different sort of proposition.”
Dennis said that no matter how advanced AI and computing becomes, there will always be a place for humans in finance.
“I would really encourage students to work on their interpersonal skills, whether that’s debate in the classroom or going to a dinner and being able to have a lively dialogue,” Dennis said. “What makes you interesting is the way you put your own lens on everything.”