This series is about what graduates are supposed to do now that AI is going to do a lot of the entry-level grunt work, and what universities should do about it. With that topic in mind, when I name it, what sort of thoughts come to you?

To be completely transparent, I'm 68 years old, and I wish I were 18. I truly believe the opportunities available to 18- to 25-year-olds today are extraordinary, so I'm not worried.

Jobs will change, and some will disappear. But it's going to take people with creative energy who know how to use AI as a constructive tool to do something meaningful with it. It's also going to take people with a strong ethical compass, because the ethics around how AI is deployed will be one of the defining challenges for the next generation.

We are on the front lines of solving medical problems, environmental problems, societal problems, and we're doing it in partnership with AI. For smart, creative, curious students, the world is open to them in ways it has never been before. That's where I stand.

The challenge for professors like me is that what we're teaching students today isn't necessarily what they'll need four years from now. So we have to focus on developing nimble, flexible, curious minds, because the specific tools that exist today will not be the tools they'll use in the future. We taught people how to use Google and Yahoo and AOL. Some of those players no longer exist. Who knows which companies will still be leading this space in five years, whether it's Anthropic, Meta, or someone else entirely.

The way I see it, success will belong to the creative, strategic, forward-thinking AI prompters, the ones who know how to use these tools in ways no one has thought of yet. That's especially true as we move from standard AI interactions toward more agentic AI applications.

The students who spend four years using AI to write their papers and fix their grammar are not going to be the winners. The winners will be the ones who find creative ways to use AI to augment their thinking, not replace it. And do accomplish tasks that are impossible for humans to do.

Jobs will disappear. That's always been true. When the internet arrived, people lost jobs. When solar energy scaled, people lost jobs. When coal gave way to other energy sources, people lost jobs. That's how progress works. The challenge for the next generation is to ask, what do I do in that world, not how do I find the job my parents had, because those jobs simply won't exist anymore.

On the entry-level question, there was a study done by IBM. I haven't seen an updated version, but it was revealing. It found that what CEOs want from early-career employees is creative thinking, problem-solving, inventive thinking, and the ability to see the world differently.

Meanwhile, hiring managers wanted people who showed up, checked the boxes, and played nicely within the system. There's a real disconnect between what CEOs want and what hiring managers are selecting for. That's a gap that needs to be closed.

When I look back at the research I did, interviewing breakthrough inventors and innovators to understand what inspired them to achieve what they achieved, it wasn't the rule-followers who made the breakthroughs. In fact, high grades in conventional science classes had a negative correlation with success as an inventor. Because in that model, you look up the answer. What matters is how you think: creatively, strategically, with a forward-looking orientation.

Will it be hard to find a job? Yes, for some. But it will also open space for people who think differently and approach opportunities in unconventional ways. Highly educated or just smart. I remain optimistic. But it will take more rigorous self-knowledge, more intellectual courage, and a real willingness not to be defined by what AI can already do. AI can solve many problems, but it still takes people to drive. It's like my new Tesla, a remarkable machine, but utterly useless without someone to direct it. A car with no driver is just a taxi with no destination.

The real opportunity is for forward-thinking people who ask, how can we use this to change the world? How can we extend human life? How can we reverse some of the environmental damage our generation and the ones before us created? That's what AI should be doing, not just helping someone write a memo to their boss.

Every time a new technology emerges, we initially use it to do what we were already doing, just slightly faster. That's where we are with maybe 75% of AI use today: it's essentially Google with better syntax. The real breakthroughs will come from the people who imagine entirely new uses. That's what the next generation needs to internalize.

You mentioned electricity, the internet, the Industrial Revolution. It took a long time before we got workers' rights and protections. It feels like every revolution is followed by a period of people having to fight to be treated fairly. With AI, it feels completely unchallenged, like a small group of people are just deciding everything. And historically, when a small group has that kind of power, it doesn't usually end well for everyone else. I've been thinking about this as a deep question.

It's an interesting observation. I'll be honest, I've spent most of my career focused on the innovators and the forward-leaning thinkers, not on the broader workforce dynamics. So this may be territory where others are better positioned to lead.

I should also acknowledge that I teach at Babson, where we work with a very select group of students. We're not training the next generation of factory workers. State colleges and community colleges are doing that important work, and I respect it. It's just not where my focus is.

That said, I don't want to be so narrowly focused that I miss an obligation. Part of what we should be doing as educators, especially with students who will have real power, is teaching them ethics and genuine human responsibility. How do you treat people well? That's something we've lost track of in a lot of institutional settings.

And you're right that organized labor may need to reinvent itself. I worked in and around Ford for a time and witnessed some difficult dynamics between management and unions. What we need, I believe, is something closer to human-centered design applied to employment systems, not purely profit-driven structures that treat people as resources to be optimized. I teach human-centered design, and I think that framework has a lot to offer in this context.

There's obviously a widening gap between the winners and everyone else. I don't have a complete answer to that. It's not my primary area of scholarship. But I can say this: as someone who talks about AI a great deal, I can't be irresponsible and just tell students to use AI in any way, for any purpose, regardless of impact. We need to teach leadership, not just management, and with leadership comes accountability to the people you work with and serve.

Can a company like Meta or Tesla use AI to eliminate thousands of jobs? Technically, yes. But if they're going to operate as responsible corporations, they can't simply do it without asking, what happens to those people? How will that impact the quality of our work? That's a question society needs to answer together.

And there's an interesting American dimension here. For years, we couldn't find enough Americans to do the frontline service and labor work, so we relied on immigrant labor. That policy is now being actively challenged. If that pipeline closes, we'll need to figure out what replaces it, and the honest answer is probably some combination of automation and a rethinking of work itself. Whether that's good or bad depends entirely on how it's managed and who benefits.

The second question is taken from your TEDx. You said that innovators are not primarily shaped by their school experiences, but by out-of-school experiences. And universities are under real pressure right now. Some people question what they can offer in an age of AI. There are even universities with no professors. What do you think needs to change?

It's a genuinely challenging moment for higher education. The model hasn't changed all that much since its origins. We put 40 students in a room, put a professor at the front, and deliver content. We've added discussions, small-group projects, experiential components, but the core architecture is familiar.

I commute two hours to Babson, and I do it deliberately, because what we're trying to teach is not just content. We're teaching an entrepreneurial mindset. And the more we can shift from content delivery toward teaching students how to think, rather than just what to think about, the more relevant we'll be. Content is available in seconds on any phone. What's scarce is wisdom, judgment, and the ability to ask generative questions.

When I interviewed the inventors and innovators in my research, almost none of them pointed to school as the source of their creative spark. What shaped them was mentorship. It was blowing things up in the backyard, constructively, not dangerously.

It was taking long walks, exploring, tinkering, following curiosity without a predetermined destination. I have four daughters and six grandchildren, and I believe deeply in getting young people out into the natural world and away from screens.

What worries me about the current conversation in higher education is that we keep asking, how do we use AI in the classroom better? That's the wrong question. The right question is, how do we help students take genuine ownership of their own learning, now and for the rest of their lives? That's a harder question to answer, but it's the one that matters.

I studied with Eleanor Duckworth, one of the great theorists of discovery learning, who drew on Elliot Eisner of Stanford. He argued that curricula should be designed to uncover content, not simply cover it. The goal is exploration. If I wanted to teach foundational engineering principles without modern technology, I'd take students to Peru and have them figure out how Machu Picchu was built. I learned about their ingenuity on a recent trip to Peru.

It has to be experiential. It has to be hands-on. It has to build mindset, strategic thinking, and the tolerance for ambiguity that real problem-solving demands. It cannot be about extracting content from a book and delivering it back in a blue book or multiple choice exam.

Many of my colleagues at other institutions are still doing exactly that. Part of the reason is class size. I sometimes teach 150 students at a time, and the personal attention I can give is limited. But in my freshman course, I co-teach with an organizational behavior professor. Our students start companies and sell products in the first year. That's not incidental. That's the curriculum. My job is to coach them through that journey.

I also take students to Silicon Valley for a week every year, and the value isn't in any lecture I give. It's in the exposure to real people, real ventures, real successes and failures. That's what AI simply cannot replicate. It's not human enough.

I love the story of one of our alumni. His family runs an optical business in Malaysia, and rather than just returning to take it over, he created the Warby Parker of Malaysia. He leapfrogged the family business using what he'd learned. That's the question I ask every student from a family business: what would you do differently? Not how do you run this business, but where does it go next?

We need to teach students how to imagine the future, how to move toward it, and how to keep imagining the next future after that. That's the core of what I do, helping people think about the future, plan for it, and then plan for the one after that.

Quick thing about curiosity. You've said that curious minds are the most important asset going forward. Why curiosity specifically? Why not judgment, creativity, communication, ethics? And how do you actually assess it? Can you put a credential on curiosity?

I'll admit I'm not a natural enthusiast of grading. I recognize it's necessary, and rigor matters. Harvard figured that out when they realized you can't give A's just for showing up. But for something like curiosity, you know it when you see it.

Here's how I think about the continuum: curiosity leads to creativity. Creativity is good ideas. Innovation is good ideas that people care about. Entrepreneurship is good ideas that people care about and that someone is willing to pay for. So if you're teaching entrepreneurship rather than just general creativity, curiosity is the headwater. It's where everything flows from.

Is curiosity more important than ethics? Absolutely not. Is it more important than judgment? That depends on what you mean by judgment.

Judgment, in my experience, often functions as a shutdown mechanism. When someone says, I'm just playing devil's advocate, my response is that the devil has enough advocates and doesn't need any more. Judgment, deployed too early, closes things down rather than opening them up. It takes the valve and shuts off the flow, and at that point, you've lost the possibility of discovering something genuinely new.

I'd rather see students ask more questions, stay curious longer, sit with ambiguity, and resist the urge to evaluate prematurely. Let the customer decide what's valuable. Not me, not the student, not the class. When students ask me, what do you think of my idea, my answer is always the same: it doesn't matter what I think, it doesn't matter what you think, it only matters what the customer thinks. The only valid test is whether the people you're trying to serve actually care.

Where judgment is necessary, absolutely, is when something is unethical, harmful, or destructive. That's where evaluation has real work to do. But in the generative phase of building something new, premature judgment is the enemy of progress.

I've become less interested in being the smartest person in the room and more interested in asking the best questions. After all these years, I've come to believe that's actually the more powerful stance. And yes, as a professor, I'm accountable for grades, but I'd rather just unleash as many students as I possibly can.

What I push for in my own courses is rigor in the questions students ask and in the coherence between their questions and their proposed solutions. There's no right answer in my field. The real discipline is in how hard your questions are and whether your thinking genuinely rises to meet them.

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