Is My MBA Obsolete? A Classroom Confronts AI
I’m talking about a graduate financial accounting class right now. A lot of my peers in it are in the MBA program.
Last night, the professor brought up a Chat GPT prompt and was taking us through some financial analysis of the Apple 10K and its peers and competitors.
It was a pretty impressive feat of technology. Only a few years ago, I was arguing that this technology was just a fun toy, but even in my own life I have found it useful.
This display prompted one of my colleagues in the class to raise her hand, and she asked if the computer could do all that work, what is the point of what we are learning.
We all laughed, because all of us in that room, the professor included, knew the threat of technology to the current mode of work.
Someone said that the goal is to leverage the technology better than the next person.
My whole life, computers have become more and more capable. I have joked that being good at trivia is useless task when everyone has Google.
I think what all of us facing AI have to do is to be adaptable, but it’s more than that. Right now, AI is only as good as the questions we ask it. We have to be good at asking questions. What facilitates that is deep domain knowledge. If a machine can do broad computing tasks faster than any human, we have to be the ones that supply the questions and interpret the outputs.
