MIT Course: Leading in the Age of AI

This fall, I decided to upskill myself and take a professional development course at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. It's called "Leading AI Strategy: From Hype to Enterprise Reality".

I'm only one week in, and I can't stop thinking about this concept of the "bionic enterprise".

Moving forward, companies that implement AI at the core of their operations will have an advantage. Long gone are the days of entirely human-led work.

While this is a scary prospect in some regard (cue the three the frontier model company staff departures over the past couple of weeks), but alas, here we are at a new frontier.

Part AI, part human - the business infrastructure of the future invites us to first understand what aspects of our roles require explicit knowledge, and can thus be automated with AI, and what aspects require implicit knowledge, and cannot be automated.

I started thinking about the grants process, and as I am learning in my course, many aspects of the grants management process require partially explicit knowledge (like getting a solid first draft, but requiring a human expert to get a proposal across the finish line).

And that time saved can then (arguably) be reallocated to building relationships with funders.

Over the past few years, I have made many assertions about how AI could create a new grants process with trusted relationships at its core, and now these assertions have an academic grounding in how this could work in practice. 🙌