You co-authored a Chronicle piece called “AI Demands a Fundamental Shift in How Higher Ed Organizes Knowledge.” And with The Generator, you’ve been building that shift for three years. Can you say what changes you’re seeing, what’s actually working, and what took longer than you thought it would?

There are fascinating phenomena occurring right now: AI and scientific discovery, AI and innovation, AI and pedagogical innovation, AI and new types of scholarly research. We launched two and a half years ago because Babson College is known for entrepreneurship and innovation, and we wanted to build greater AI capabilities and AI community at the college.

You’re an entrepreneur, right? Everybody starts somewhere. So we decided to peer-train our colleagues in AI concepts and tools. My team is 14 faculty now; we were eight then. And we unilaterally decided we were going to start training Babson faculty (we have slightly over 200) in AI concepts and tools for pedagogical innovation. We did multiple training programs, and we’ve now peer-trained over 50% of Babson faculty, which is world class.

Simultaneously, we had different student-facing initiatives. We do Entrepreneurship & AI Buildathons. We have all types of programming. But we’re all figuring this out, right? Two weeks from now, we have the head of AI and Education at Oxford University coming to Babson as our keynote. We’re doing an event for faculty called “AI and the Future of Higher Education.”

We see our role as driving faculty conversations about AI. The overwhelming majority of faculty globally, I think tragically, narrowly conceptualize AI as ChatGPT and large language models, when we know there are also large vision models, large reasoning models, large quantitative models. Part of our job is to complexify AI and broaden the conversation to the actual fascinating moment we’re in.

It’s a fascinating moment in higher education. We believe it’s faculty’s job to lead the AI revolution. We are the ones at the front line with students. That’s why we launched three years ago.

Context really matters, right? It matters in AI, and it matters when you’re trying to lead change. Babson is a small college, about 2,600 undergrads, with 1,000 MBAs, with a reputation, history, and focus on entrepreneurship and innovation. We are not a large 60,000-person university. We are a focused private college that knows why it’s on the map and has a clear vision and strategy.

If you don’t have an AI-capable faculty, you can’t execute on any strategy, and that’s why I keep looping back to faculty. We did research a couple of years ago and found that about 80% of Babson faculty were interested in learning about AI for teaching innovation and for research innovation. We found we had a curious and receptive audience.

Do we have people who have justified concerns about AI? Of course we do. And that’s why we leaned in and launched this initiative to peer-train our colleagues. When you know your identity, when you know your strategy, when you know your history, you can start to expedite strategic decision-making, versus when you don’t know who you are.

We crowdsourced a book. We have 25 faculty from across the college contributing to a book called AI Entrepreneurship Education. We are constantly experimenting with and disseminating new pedagogies in our programs. We have a year-long program that all first-year students take where they explore new venture concepts and actually found and scale ventures the college funds. We’ve worked AI into that. Think 800 first-year students doing a year-long experiential class, and The Generator has led infusing AI into that signature program.

The Generator’s most recent Buildathon was on April 11th, with 500 students, not only from Babson, collaborating with Olin and Wellesley and others. What did students actually build? What kind of AI-native ventures came out of those rooms that would have been impossible two, three years ago?

That was technically our fourth. We’ve done one a semester for the past four semesters. We had students from 35 universities, with some flying in from Georgia and Michigan. We had top AI company sponsors in terms of compute and awards.

The fascinating thing is entrepreneurial prototyping is like a rocket ship right now. All of our undergraduates get degrees in business. But even in the past three months, six months, nine months, what our students can do in terms of prototyping, software and hardware, it’s like we’re at takeoff.

I haven’t yet had the time to analyze the full portfolio of, I don’t know, 60 teams and concepts we had. But we’re getting clickable prototypes, we’re getting working physical prototypes, within the course of six to eight hours.

I’ll note one example. For a middle-aged man, a team had an AI-enabled insole with fine-grain real-time sensing of your gait, your walking gait or running gait, and weight displacement. The demographics are clear in terms of people with foot problems. There’s a long delay in feedback when you have foot problems, whether you’re an elite athlete or just a middle-aged man. They had a whole platform that was a really impressive MVP, a real-time intelligent embedded AI insole to avoid injury or to enhance performance. We just wouldn’t have seen that two years ago.

Babson has been ranked the number one entrepreneurship undergraduate institution nationally for 29 years in a row. What do you need to change, and what do universities need to change in general, to keep getting that recognition in 2030 or 2035, with AI and these shifts going on?

We’re having this conversation because we’re all fascinated with AI’s impact on industry and society. And it’s not all good. But fundamentally, my disposition is one of an optimist. I see enormous societal benefit, in healthcare and education, in having, for lack of a better label, more intelligence available at lower costs throughout society.

What changes? It gets down to the issue of human purpose, and maybe our purposes in our careers and how we spend our days. Do we want to just work, or do we want to solve problems and drive innovations and create new value and solve pressing-scale societal problems?

I have an undergraduate student right now who’ll be starting at McKinsey in September. I love how he identifies. He says, listen, I’m not a worker, I’m a problem solver. I’m getting hired and paid to solve complicated problems.

AI is going to reshape economic structures, it’s going to reshape organizational structures, and whenever there’s change, there’s opportunity.

What is the purpose of higher education? It needs to be higher than getting a job. If you get into entrepreneurship, what you watch entrepreneurs do is navigate gripping ambiguity. They understand what creates value. They understand how to apply creativity and prototype ideas for novel products and services. They understand how to craft and refine value propositions.

It’s a good time to be at Babson, as its focus is on navigating ambiguity and uncertainty. This is what we train.

Most universities in the world right now are still debating, or locked in about, whether to permit AI on assignments. Most do not have any AI policy. If you were advising a dean at a non-Babson school today, what is the first hard step you would tell them to take?

I’m not all in on AI. I’m all in on AI understanding. And I don’t believe that every class should have AI or leverage AI or allow AI, but I do believe that every university faculty needs to understand AI at this point. Not every little nook and cranny, but they need to understand that AI is not just large language models.

So what would I tell a dean? I would say, build an AI-capable faculty. And that is a non-trivial thing, how to even get a head of steam on that.

We’re at a fascinating point in higher ed. Oxford, as some of you may know, and the University of California state system, because they see it as such an equity issue, have secured access to frontier models for ALL their faculty, staff, and students. And they do that so we don’t have the haves and have-nots, where some have fifth-rate models that are free and that are productizing the user, and others are using frontier models.

So I would say, if you’re a dean, or if you’re a president, it’s incumbent upon you to address this equity issue and put your students, faculty, and staff on the frontier. Not just Wild West, but with governance, and with guardrails.

But our students ultimately need to understand AI. You may have heard this concept of cognitive sovereignty, or cognitive ownership. It’s not just, “hey, student, use AI, it’s powerful.” We’re going to triple down into the humanities, in terms of what is you, what is the edge of you, what is the model. All of life in careers and professions is not information processing. The role of reputation of an individual or a team will only grow in the AI age, as will understanding the ownership of work products.

This is super complicated. We haven’t figured it out. The faculty I talk to from around the world, no one’s figured this out. Why don’t we add in technology that reshapes industry, society, and higher education all at once, dramatically, in a way you can’t even keep up with.

On the Microsoft partnership, you said “applied AI researchers building, students stress-testing, and business owners grounding it all in what actually matters.” What did Microsoft want from a university partner that it couldn’t get internally? And what did your students learn that they couldn’t have learned from a curriculum alone?

One of The Generator’s strategic initiatives is, we set the goal to train a thousand small business owners in AI for business growth. The program is called the AI Innovators Bootcamp for Small Business. So far, we’ve trained nearly 150 small businesses.

There’s a crisis for small business owners. They have a poor understanding of AI. They have limited quality outlets to get that understanding. What we decided in The Generator is, we could pilot a new type of two-way experiential learning where business owners could learn from our most AI-savvy students about AI and its power and possibilities. And our students, they may be brilliant at AI at age 21, but they haven’t founded and scaled a small business. So our students benefit from learning from seasoned business owners. That is the target of a thousand. It’s an ongoing initiative that will go on for another couple of years.

As part of that work, and as part of Babson’s identity and alumni base, where we have lots of small business owners, The Generator partnered with Microsoft Research to engage small businesses around some agent-related service concepts that Microsoft wanted to kick the tires on. We organized a session with small business owners and our students so we would get multiple angles on some prototypes Microsoft was considering.

I’m going to need you, Erik, to bring out a crystal ball. Ten years out, what does an entrepreneurship education look like globally, or at Babson? And what is the entry-level job market actually offering a graduate in 2035? So, what is the education offering, and what is the entry-level job market actually offering that graduate?

Obviously I’ll push back on 10 years. My crystal ball only goes out one to three years, given this rate of change.

In terms of your business, I’m assuming one of your business assumptions, which I think is correct, is there’s going to be a sci-fi-level explosion of entrepreneurship and tiny teams. I think a good working assumption for the next three to five years certainly is sci-fi-level individual and small-team capability with respect to innovation and entrepreneurship, and an explosion of entrepreneurship, or renaissance of entrepreneurship.

How much is the entry-level job market going to go down, and how much will be supplanted by entrepreneurship, I don’t know.

I can tell you in terms of education, and I’m not going to speak for all of education, because I don’t know all of education, but let me just focus on higher-ed institutions.

I do think, what’s the expression, “player coach.” The “sage on the stage” days of higher education, at least in business and innovation, that’s dead. And I think the new form will be player-coach, where you’re going to have the best faculty as facilitators, experience framers and enablers. They’re not going to be lecturers, and they’re going to be embedded with student teams, building and jointly pursuing bold innovations.

And also just keeping up. Let’s be clear, I spend all my available time trying, with limited success, to keep up with AI in relationship to entrepreneurship innovation. And I can’t. I’m doing as many reps as I can. I’m designing classes around it, I’m researching around it, I’m interviewing founders around it. It’s very time consuming.

So that’s a qualitative answer to your question. I’m only talking about business education, and a flavor of that that focuses on experiential. But I think coach-player, embedded, facilitative, minimal lecturing, and guide, that’s where experiential education is going, in my mind.

*This interview has been lightly edited for clarity and readability. The interviewee reviewed and approved the transcript before publication.