Your MBA, AI and the Future of Work

After 25 years in technology, Part-Time MBA alumnus Kiran Bangalore, general manager at Microsoft, has seen the industry transform again and again. Now, as artificial intelligence reshapes how people work, build businesses and approach their careers, he sees another major shift underway.

For MBA students preparing to lead in this new environment, Bangalore believes understanding business fundamentals is only part of the equation. The other is learning how to adapt, experiment and put emerging technology to work.

In this video, he shares why continuous learning matters in the age of AI and how MBA students can turn what he calls “intelligence on tap” into opportunity.

Video Transcript

Our entire human ecosystem is built on the fact we're all economical people. Right?

We need money to survive. We need money to buy a house. We need money to buy a car. Entire ecosystems based on that, right. So you get a job, get a salary that pays your bills, blah, blah, blah.

To be fair, you can't discount that in any way. Successful people today are defined by people who make $1 billion in stock and money. And access to technology in some ways is a means to get there.

Will AI Take Away Your Job?

So, a lot of people ask me questions like, “Hey, will I have a job with AI? Will AI take away my job?” And I always tell them, I don't think AI will take away your job. But as the Nvidia CEO said most famously, “Somebody with AI will.” And but if you don't know AI, you're probably not going to have a job.

Your Education Doesn't End With a Degree

When you start off your early days of working, you go through school and you think, I'm done learning and I'm not going to apply this learning, and that's how my world is going to change. I now fast-forward 25 years into my career, I've realized, I've gone through so many technology transitions or just the world transitions constantly. And we're in the midst of one right now. So every day is, you learn something new and you figure out how does that apply to your world. What I refer to as the world is changing.

There's a new artificial intelligence world coming where all our lives will probably be touched by artificial intelligence. And the people who probably will do better than other people are people who are open to learning this new technology, adopting it and seeing what it makes sense in their world. Like, how can they apply AI to their own world.

Technology has come to a point where with AI, you have access to pretty much anything and you can build it quickly, even by yourself. We see this advent of solopreneurs in the Bay Area, just single people building companies.

Turning AI Into Opportunity

So I think the key part is your MBA is going to give you that understanding of what business means and how to make money, and what does money mean, and what are the sustainable fashions in which you can sustain a business in the long term. How do you combine the two to actually make something great?

So I always tell people, like with AI, we sort of are in this advent of we have intelligence on tap. I think of like a beer on tap. Intelligence is just available to you for that. You can just dole out how much you want and use it. What will you do with it?

Imagine the world's intelligence available to you all the time. Can you take that and make something of it and then actually make money and be successful and so on and so forth.