Your playbook for making AI real, practical, and valuable.
Jie Tao, DSc, an associate professor of business analytics and the director of the AI and Technology Institute at Fairfield University’s Charles F. Dolan School of Business, provides listeners with a practical guide to mastering AI for real results.
Each episode delivers actionable tools, proven frameworks, and real-world case studies to help leaders and innovators leverage AI for business growth and career success. Explore topics from the Practical AI Playbook to insights from Fairfield Dolan's AI and Tech Institute and discover powerful AI applications shaping the future.
Episodes
Tuesday May 19, 2026
Tuesday May 19, 2026
Hosts Philip Maymin and Jie Tao sit down with President Mark Nemec of Fairfield University for a conversation about what actually survives the AI disruption of higher education, and what no university should ever hand off to a machine. This time the U stands for University. The argument starts with time horizons. Students think in weeks, faculty in semesters, deans in years, presidents in decades. Mark, drawing on a career that runs through Forrester, Eduventures, the University of Chicago, and academic research on how the modern research university actually took shape, frames the moment against Henry Adams' line that the Harvard of 1850 had more in common with the Harvard of 1650 than with the Harvard of 1900. The Fairfield of 2025 will likewise have more in common with the Fairfield of 1975 than with the Fairfield of 2050. But it will still be Fairfield. MOOCs were going to end residential education. The metaverse was going to end the campus. Sora was going to end film studios. COVID was going to end the residential experience entirely. None of those endings arrived. The group works through the toughest questions for higher ed. Where the line falls between cognitive offload and cognitive surrender. Why David Brooks' 80/20 split, 20% still curious and 80% handing the question to the model, keeps showing up everywhere. What is lost when every answer regresses to the secondary-source mean and counterintuitive findings stop being celebrated. Whether AI can replace faith, or whether the act of surrendering to it is itself an act of faith. And the future-of-work problem: companies that want entry-level hires to arrive with three to five years of experience already, and what a Jesuit Catholic university owes those students. The episode closes somewhere more personal. Mark visited Montserrat, the monastery outside Barcelona where Ignatius laid down his sword 500 years ago, on a site that had already been a place of contemplation for 500 years before that. Fairfield itself was founded less than four months after Pearl Harbor. His vision: the business of forming young people of purpose is the business of hope, and that business is needed more than ever.