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
Aug 4, 2026
Aug 4, 2026
57 min
Dr. Philip Maymin and Dr. Jie Tao close out a two-part conversation with Margarida Sacouto and Sheila Green, graduates of Fairfield Dolan's MS in Business Analytics and AI, who spent a semester consulting for Synchrony Financial. This time: what they built, and why it took so long to start.
Sixty to seventy percent of the client work was spec-driven development, not code — a constitution, then a spec, then plans and tasks, in plain English, before anything ran. Green's group logged seven versions. Sacouto's pitch to executives: three days of every five-day week lost to data prep, cut to hours, and models scored better on her team's engineered features.
Maymin presses: isn't that just vibe spec-ing? Tao won't have it. Vibe coding, he says, is prompt and pray; auditing, red teaming, and persona challenges are the opposite. He abandoned test-driven development as models gained autonomy — the model becomes both judge and player, writing weak tests and gaming them. Maymin floats checkpoint-driven development as the successor; Tao counters with a living deliverable, not a living document.
The classroom rule follows from the practice: "I don't think it's responsible to teach students something that I don't use every day." The tool changes every semester — n8n on the original syllabus, Claude Skills by the end — and the philosophy doesn't. "We teach you the philosophy through the tool."
At the Institute's one-year showcase, senior Synchrony executives fill the room, the projector fails, a teammate away at an NCAA lacrosse tournament appears on video, and Green jokes about it. Synchrony asked for the students back.
"I'm becoming the bottleneck. I realize that. But I'm still slowing it down." Synchrony's side lands next episode.