Panel explores AI's impact on business at 22nd annual Hokies on Wall Street

The promise and potential peril of artificial intelligence has become a pressing topic across the business world over the last year.

An evening panel during Pamplin College of Business’s 22nd annual Hokies on Wall Street event in New York City discussed the key skills and personality attributes that students entering the job market will need to fit into a world influenced by AI.

Titled, “The AI Workplace of the Future: What Wall Street Needs from Business Education,” the six-person panel consisted mostly of Virginia Tech graduates who have gone on to tech-oriented jobs which have given them a front-row seat to how artificial intelligence is changing the way business is getting done.

Among the panelists were Trish Cox ’90, an independent advisor and Finance Advisory Board member; Steve Hunter ’95, a senior data scientist and AI specialist with Swiss securities firm UBS; Marco Leung ’12, a senior manager with global consultant Deloitte; Aditya Mothadaka ’14, a portfolio manager with Elequin Capital LP; and Tipsy Talwar, managing director, Americas, and head of systematic advisory sales with Morgan Stanley.

Reza Barkhi, KPMG Professor of Accounting and Information Systems in the Pamplin College of Business, was also on the panel, which was moderated by Pamplin Dean Saonee Sarker.

Sarker started the discussion by saying that it’s important to find a meeting point between the two contrasting views of AI: a utopian view, which posits that AI is the solution to all problems; and a dystopian view, which focuses on the dark side of AI.

“In a recent article, one expert said that if you are not having an existential crisis with AI, then you are probably not embracing it enough,” Sarker said. 

While the panelists generally agreed that students will need to master certain technology disciplines to thrive in an AI world, they also stressed the importance of possessing a wide range of timeless human attributes.

“Yes, we will need people who know how to work with data and how to code AI applications,” said Leung. “But we’re also looking for creativity and patience. When you put an AI tool in front of somebody, the first thing that you tell it to do may not be the answer that you're looking for. It requires a lot of tries to get it to work with you, to get to the answer and results and outcomes that you want.’’

Cox emphasized the necessity of being both naturally curious and willing to be a lifelong learner. “You have to take risks and lean into things that you might feel a little uncomfortable with,” she said.

Hunter also added that young workers involved with AI will also have to possess “a healthy disrespect for the machine because just as a human can make it, a human can break it.”

While AI is inherently a quantitative discipline, Mothadaka told Hokies in attendance that they shouldn’t be overly intimidated by hard math undermining various applications.

“You don't need to know all of that, but you do need to know when you might need to use it and how it can help solve your problems.”

Morgan Stanley’s Talwar gave the Virginia Tech audience a revealing account of how her company has gone about integrating OpenAI’s ChatGPT technology with several Morgan Stanley operations as part of a partnership between the companies. 

The partnership involved uploading 100,000 Morgan Stanley documents into OpenAI’s system to train ChatGPT’s large-language model to answer a variety of questions, including queries like “What is Morgan Stanley’s latest price target for shares of Apple? “

The Pamplin School of Business is in the process of ascertaining the skills and attributes graduates will need to thrive in a business environment impacted by artificial intelligence. Pamplin’s Barkhi laid out his priority list, including enhancing technologically savvy curriculums, fostering algorithmic and computational thinking, and incorporating the ideas of AI into the curriculum.

“We moved from the farm era to the industrial era and now another era is coming up,” Barkhi said. “We need to be open to it.”

Written by John Kimelman