Stern masters’ students found that using artificial intelligence in place of some employees could “dramatically” reduce costs for startups, after pairing up with Microsoft for a semester-long program to test the effectiveness of AI business partners.
In a Harvard Business Review article, researchers detailed the results of the collaboration last spring, when 30 students split into six teams to build startups using Microsoft 365 Copilot, a generative AI chatbot. The program, which worked directly with students in the technology and entrepreneurship MBA, is one of several ongoing efforts across the Stern School of Business to integrate AI on campus.
Copilot was implemented as part of the “Frontier Firm” model — in which companies are built around AI — and was able to perform tasks like sending emails, making slideshows and building job descriptions. J.P. Eggers, a project faculty advisor and Stern professor, told WSN that students were able to assume more executive roles by delegating Copilot to brainstorm initial ideas.
“Students talked more about the concepts, and the tool created the document,” Eggers said. “They — the same way a senior manager might for a junior employee — would review it, make tweaks and make suggestions on how to change it and decide what they were or weren’t going to use.”
The September report detailed how using Copilot transformed the students’ work process into a regular conversation with AI, allowing them to focus on enhancing the quality of their proposals without spending time on the practical project operations. However, some students found that depending on AI could “create a false sense of security” because of its overconfidence.
Zé Vieira, project leader and Stern Tech MBA candidate, said this change in dynamic forced students to consider AI as a partner and co-founder that could make important decisions and increase productivity in some areas.
“I see embedding AI at work as the next phase after automation,” Vieira wrote in an email statement to WSN. “You set the context and tone, and give it a goal. In the end, you step in to review and curate the output. This curation can simply be editing a document, an image or an email. It’s not that AI replaces the role of the human being as the creative; it enhances it.”
Amid concerns that AI will replace employees, Eggers said that if education is reconstructed to build around the use of technology and not against it, students will come out with a better understanding of how it could advance their careers.
“Schools need to figure this out,” Eggers said. “Because if they don’t do it, then outside third-parties will come along and be able to do it instead. And that becomes, at some point, an existential threat for universities as educators.”
Contact Noah Kim at [email protected].