Joining me now is Saikat Chaudhuri, innovation strategy and engineering professor at UC Berkeley Psychos.
Thank you so much for making the trip cross country.
So happy to have you here on NYC Live.
Great to be here.
Thank you for inviting me.
Yeah, you could have brought the nice weather with you when you were coming over from California, let me tell you.
But first, I wanna start just what challenges and opportunities really exist for companies navigating this AI disruption because we hear about it every single day.
So how are companies reacting and how are they sort of navigating this landscape?
Yeah, I think there's a lot of confusion out there, and we hear a lot of negative news, you know, job losses being primary amongst them.
I think companies, especially established ones, are struggling a little bit.
I mean, one is they can't keep up with the technology and the models.
So much is happening all day.
But at the same time, I think they're struggling on how to use it, right?
Every investor asks them, what's your AI strategy, which I think is kind of foolish because the real question is, well, it's a tool?
What can you do to change your business enabled by AI.
Um, one is the data side.
They don't have the data to actually make it work, but for me, the bigger challenge is strategic and organizational.
What will my firm look like in the future?
It's not just about eliminating jobs or automating tasks.
It's really about figuring out how can I transform my company.
So that's really the biggest challenge that I think that executives are facing.
I think it's executives as well as those looking for jobs, right?
How are, how is this technology going to impact the job landscape in the future?
And to that, what impact is AI having on this job landscape and the skills that employers are looking for?
So from my perspective, I'm actually more optimistic on that landscape than pessimistic.
When the internet came.
Everybody focused on brick and mortar and how jobs are getting decimated.
The internet created more jobs than ever before.
It's hard for people to imagine what new things can be created.
It's easy for them to imagine what will go away.
So I think the same thing will happen here.
I can't even tell you all the new jobs that will be created.
The skills that we need though are not just well defined technology skills, coding and the like is obviously going to be shrinking, but we need judgment, we need consciousness, we need prioritization.
So if you think about it, an insurance company has to reinvent itself.
We can do all the investments, we can do things like figuring out premiums pretty easily, right?
What's the actuary going to do?
It's all about, oh, well, now I can give you spot insurance.
If you want to go to Lake Tahoe tomorrow with your friends and you do medical and car rental and lodging insurance, I.
Give you that in half an hour on the spot customized to your needs and your people.
That's how we have to think about it and then it creates new possibilities.
And so what role do universities like the one that you teach at UC Berkeley, what role do they play in really driving entrepreneurship and innovation around AI and how it's going to grow in the years to come?
I think both on the research and technology development side and on the education side, right?
On the technology side, I mean, LLMs and so forth, right?
If you think about it, Berkeley helped co-found, you know, OpenAI as well as Perplexity is also our alum, right?
So that's where that stuff came from, right?
And other areas like life sciences with Jennifer Doudna, that's the case also in materials, carbon, so forth, right?
Um, so that's one side of it.
Research, we're in a deep tech world again, we're not just applying things.
The second though is education.
We have to prepare our graduates to really be prepared for thinking about critical, um, analytical problem solving.
It's about defining the landscape and then taking the approaches.
Use AI as a tool, uh, and not, you know, just go and do basic coding.
So let's say I'm a student.
What questions am I asking the most when it comes to, not the future of AI but just the future of work with obviously AI playing a major disrupting force in it?
So the question, I think the most elementary question is how can I get a job?
Uh, I read all this out.
Even before, I feel like we're all wondering.
I remember back in my student days, I was wondering how do I get a job.
We're all wondering that, right?
Absolutely.
But the second question becomes, what are the skills that are going to be important for me?
What do I need to learn?
What I tell them is learn statistics and math, even if you're doing computer science.
It's not a bad field at all, but don't just focus on the coding part, right?
But I think it's going to be a renaissance of the liberal arts.
I think that whether it's uh the philosophy side, the writing.
Side, when it comes to analytical problem solving, quantitative qualitatively, that's all going to be coming back as well.
That's what we need, both because of the deep tech nature of what we're facing, but also because that's the part the machine can't do yet.
We've seen it before.
I mean, think about mechanization of farming or something like that or industrialization.
All that's happened.
We've upped our game and so that's what's going to happen now too.
I guess the other question people ask is how can I get an A?
So I tell them, use AI.
Here's another question I was asking every day while I was in college.
Absolutely right, we all were, and back then what used to be an A-level paper is now going to be something which is, you know, everybody can do using chachi Pit.
I'm a professor who tells people use all the technology you want.
That just became a nice draft and that became a nice standard B-level paper.
Now use your brains in order to do the exciting part.
Let's level up.
Pyat.
I really appreciate the conversation, Saikat Chaudhuri, professor of innovation strategy and engineering at UC Berkeley, thank you so much for joining us today on NYC Live.
It's been great being here.
Thank you, lads.
