Join us as we explore the profound impact of Artificial Intelligence on education and business. Celebrate with us as we reveal cutting-edge AI initiatives at the Quantic School of Business and Technology.
Gain insights into how AI is transforming industries and catapulting businesses to unprecedented heights. Uncover strategies for leveraging AI to foster innovation and fuel growth.
AI expert, Dr. Patrick Glauner, joins our panel as they tackle AI trends, challenges, and opportunities in a riveting live panel discussion.
Meet the Panel:
* Tom Adams, Chairman of Quantic’s parent company, Pedago
* Alexie Harper, Co-Founder and Chief Product Officer at Quantic
* Ori Ratner, Co-Founder and Chief Technology Officer at Quantic
Good morning good afternoon good evening welcome everyone uh to today’s panel Ai and its impact on education technology and Beyond whether you’re part of the quanti community an AI Enthusiast were joining us for the first time we promise this is going to be a great discussion today in today’s panel we will discover
We will discuss how AI influences the landscape of Education technology and how it’s reshaping the way we learn teach and innovate you will also have the opportunity to get a firsthand look at quantic’s new AI advisor feature I’m Dr Patrick clowner and I’m happy to to
Be today’s moderator I teach AI as a professor in Germany at dondorf Institute of Technology which is based in Bavaria and I also run my own AI Consulting company Skyrocket AI I finished my Quantic MBA about 5 years ago and it was a great experience so I’m
Very happy to be here today now please allow me to introduce our panelists for today first we have Tom Adams the chairman of quantics parents parent company and he’s also the co-founder of Quantic next up we have Alexi Harper the co-founder and chief product officer at Quantic last but not least aie Ratner
The co-founder and CTO at Quantic welcome everyone great to have you here thank you here so let’s start with Tom uh so Tom Quantic is investing in numerous AI initiatives from the new AI advisor to the new exec itive education courses that focus on teaching AI related skills
I already had a look at the AI advisor two weeks ago and I think just yesterday you started promoting the Executive Education which is great so on the one hand many universities have been very slow in adopting AI into their curriculum and student experience and some even don’t know how to take
Advantage of AI what do you think the reason for that is what are the risks in educational institutions adopting Ai and what are the risks of not adopting AI well thanks uh very much for that question I mean uh I think uh AI is one of these groundbreaking Technologies and
It will take some time I think for everyone to sort of appreciate its scope um and also kind of come to terms with uh all the positive aspects of it but the way I think uh education ERS uh in general are responding to it sort of
Varies um in terms of where they are thinking about uh deploying it and so they’re they’re certainly I think using it to improve their planning uh creating exercises and so on that’s kind of U many uh professors and teachers are sort of adopting it for that um I think
What’s more difficult is to sort of adopted as a uh as a tool to essentially allow for information Discovery by the student uh to be more Dynamic uh because I think the the uh the unit of measure uh to some degree is the teaching hours in the classroom uh
Or let’s say the the presentations that are made online and so traditional educators are going to struggle I think to sort of reinvent themselves without having to leave a lot of their traditional practices behind um also I think that there’s a lot of energy going
To how to PR V cheating or or make sure that you know any essay that’s written uh is truly written by the student and not by Ai and I think that that’s also uh unfortunate that so much energy goes to that because I think in all our professional lives we’ve not really been
Measured in terms of essay writing as much as we have been in terms of problem solving and uh analysis and critical thinking uh and from our standpoint obviously there’s great opportunity with AI whether that’s to sort of develop the more inter interactive more open-ended um uh Learning System um or it’s
Creating more responsive advisor type of functionality uh or it’s to sort of develop more discussion-based uh interactions with our students we just see this as a terrific technology allows us to build more content uh in a better way we think um and so in general we
Think this is a very benign uh new technology and we think that um we sort of are very much um set up to take advantage of it um and in general we we’re hoping that more educational institutions uh in the world sort of see the opportunity uh and they spend less time
On the dangers of it because I think that that will slow down their adoption well thanks Tom and I fully agree we need to take advantage of that technology and I see so many professors all around the world at Classic universities they want to restrict the
Use of AI in teaching and I think if we do that the only thing we’re doing is to prepare today’s students for tomorrow’s unemployment because those tools are being used in the real world and if we ignore that reality um today’s students will be in big trouble Alexi maybe you
Can tell us more about the new Quantic AI advisor uh how does this feature improve the existing student experience sure I I’d love to um and I just want to say we’re so excited to have launched um currently our AI advisor can answer questions that range from administrative
Concerns uh to helping a student understand and practice what they’re learning in our program you really can ask the bot about anything from program schedule or Capstone requirements to how supply and demand works and many things in between um we’re in beta right now so we’re actively improving the experience
And adding new features as students in alumni ask more questions questions of AI advisor we are categorizing those questions and working to make our answers more accurate and expand the scope of what we’re able to answer um but our plan is not to stop there we have some exciting things in um the
Works for the future to incorporate AI in ways that will enhance the student experience um and we’re really excited about it that’s great um so I had a look at the AI advisor too and for example I asked the AI advisor like which statistic test should I pick you know in
The chapter on statistical test and I think it gave pretty good answers so I enjoyed that a lot let us know uh what’s your favorite aspect of the new AI advisor so I love its flexibility um as a student you can ask about your schedule or project an AI advisor will
Know what cohort you’re a part of which Capstone you’ve been assigned it can personalize its answers to your experience and you don’t actually need to give additional context or tell the bot what type of question you’re going to ask um so we’re we’re just working to make this a very seamless easy
Experience for students great uh ory since you’re the CTO I’m so curious about you know the technical details I teach AI I teach large language models so maybe you can tell us a little bit more about the technical aspects of building the AI advisor what data did you use did you
Build it on top of chat chat GPT or did you come up with your own large language model I’m so curious to learn about that yeah yeah thank you Patrick um so yeah it really starts with um our initial hypothesis was that what students would most want to do is ask questions about
Content so where we began was focusing on essentially mining our proprietary um academic material and adapting that in a way that it could be essentially leveraged by a large language model um and we were successful with that pretty early on but what we discovered was actually when given access to a bot like
This you really want to ask at everything as uh Alexi alluded to so really the project quickly widened into an effort to across our entire company expose all of the information that we could um in structured forms that could be consumed and leveraged by llms it almost became a combination of a product
An it a process you know digital transformation type of effort if you will um and so it was really interesting to see how um this technology was transforming not just the user experience but even sort of how we do business internally a little bit um so really I don’t want to get into
Obviously in this this very short call all of the details of the technical architecture but really in essence our challenge shifted to uh become one exposing all that information and that information includes things like course content assignments frequently ask questions policies the curriculum schedule information your progress
Within that your scores within that uh and so forth but then deciding with in that vast sea of information that we’ve exposed what is most relevant to the given interaction to be provided to the llm to give an accurate answer and then how do we decorate the responses in a
Way such that the student uh is able to check the answers as well for accuracy so we don’t want to just simply give some output that you have to trust as much as possible we want to cite our sources and give you more things you can
Go through to sort of verify um and that’s sort of the approach we’ve taken thus far um and and yeah we’re very excited with the results uh and yeah I’ll stop there and see if you have any other questions sounds exciting uh thanks um Alex now you launched the AI
Chatbot AI advisor few weeks ago like yesterday or two days ago I also received an email that you launched the executive education programs some of them also focus on AI training can you tell us more about those and who they are intended for yeah yeah um so as you mentioned
We’ve added several different types of certificates some in this technology space relating to AI some not um but we’re really excited about these AI certificates so um I I can mention a few of them and just kind of the varying audiences that they’re for um so one of
Them we have is called learn to code with chat GPT there are no prerequisites um you it’s intended for a very broad audience of AI enthusiasts no coding experience required and the goal is for users to be able to quickly generate code using natural language prompts while also learning the
Fundamentals of code development in the process so I would say that’s that’s one of the certificates that’s on the more accessible side um others like transform your business with AI and chat GPT are tailored to leaders who want to quickly get up to speed on how AI can be
Leveraged by their companies and then we also have a certificate that’s specifically for Tech leaders that features an AI strategy project to help help experienced Tech folks adopt new AI Technologies into their businesses so we’re really excited about all of these and our hope is that we can continue to
Grow those certificates as well as we see what our our students are interested in sounds exciting uh AI as the CTO you have done great work with your team on the AI advisor and the general adoption of AI for Quantic now you know if I look into the hugging phe portal wherever I
Feel there are like thousands of news new llms that get released every day there are so many changes all the time how do you and your team stay on top of those changes and that you’re able to take advantage of what’s happening and make sure that you remain Innovative
That’s a great question uh so as you said the field is just moving incredibly quickly today um and it really can be difficult to find that signal in the noise sometimes um I think in terms of how you stay up to date uh there’s there’s obviously some standard ways you
Can do that finding and following researchers and builders on social media is actually one of the best um they’ll often be talking about their latest papers on archive or their systems that they’ve just built or some small result that they’re excited about um but really
I think what we found is that you really need to accept that your problems are going to be unique to your business they certainly have been for us and what’s really most important I think is is having a process and infrastructure in place internally for you to be able to
Try new ideas to actually try them not just read about them uh and then quickly evaluate how how well they work for you in hopefully a way that’s safe and unbiased and maybe doesn’t require taking too much risk for your business um we’ve certainly taken a lot of time
Upfront uh to build some monitoring and evaluation tools internally that allow us to do this uh and we’ve paired that with some very short development Cycles sort of a process where we will try something quickly we will do a relatively cheap test to verify that it’s not hurting anything hopefully it’s
Helping uh and then we will rapidly expand that out to more people uh to more context and then hopefully launch it if it is successful um and so I think really I think having that feedback loop finding a way to innovate but in also a safe way has been really helpful for for
Us it’s been kind of a powerful way to manage an innovation project like this um and I think if you elevate maybe a little bit more it’s just important to recognize how immature the AI technology landscape is today I you just have to say that um so whatever software
Architecture you have now tomorrow might be a liability so if you really are planning to stay ahead and be at that edge you have to be prepared to adopt the pace of technical change that might be a little uncomfortable compared to other domains you’ve worked in um I can
Say that AI advis adviser in its very short life uh we’ve already gone through two major architectural shifts within it uh in response to both Lessons Learned and just changes in the underlying Technologies out there and I kind of expect that that’s going to be true of
Any product that’s adopting Ai and has ambitious goals I agree the field is evolving so rapidly and you really need to keep working hard every day to stay on top um what advice do you give to other Business Leaders who want to stay informed about the latest changes in Ai
And how you can foster Innovation around it yeah you know I think I might return to some of the things I said um in addition to just following what other people are doing uh you really there’s no substitute for trying it and you just
Need to find a way that you can do that safely uh for your business uh it it sounds like a simple answer but that really is it this is not an industry an ecosystem where there are best practices that have been established and you can get by by just following those you
Really do have to chart your own path to some degree and so you need to build internal expert expertise and process and so forth so that you can develop that great uh Tom I’d also like to hear your perspective on that so what do you recommend professionals and Executives
That want to implement AI for their business um what advice would you give them and do you have any advice on how they can build up knowledge in Ai and is AI nice to have for some industry or Industries or you think it’s an essential skill for all Professionals in the
Future obviously um you know uh the level of technical uh knowledge about AI will need to vary in in how I uh answer that question obviously most people um will not be you know llm engineers and so forth and that’s not really I think the the nature of your question but I
Think everyone will be GPT prompting and everyone will be working increasingly with with how to automate things within their business and I think the the risk is to not let’s say get involved in uh this technology uh means that um as efficiencies occur in companies uh Your
Role is sort of less Central to what’s going on because a lot of the change will be taking place in an AI enabled fashion um and so I think like if you sort of take a step back and and start with what is AI going to do to to
Business in general I think it’s going to re-engineer business processes so anyone working in operations has to think about whether it’s their customer support or how they sort of handle different steps in their business process how can they leverage AI to just make themselves more efficient uh without let’s say compromising on the
Customer experience and then obviously there’s all of the re-engineering that’s possible uh with the chatbot interface uh and the overall AI uh enablement uh that’s coming with this uh new generative form of of of of AI um obviously uh some people here are thinking about starting a company and a
New technology like this creates that opportunity um and then finally I would say that you know one of the sort of curious things for me about this technology is that it allows you to deliver high quality experiences in languages other than let’s say the one of your core Market
Whatever that core Market would be um and so I think more companies will go Global much earlier because you can essentially create a support structure for your customers uh in other languages that’s really accessible I think that most people um need to also see this technology is very much something that
Will be um part of every business discussion and so I think it’s important to sort of have values um around this topic that are filled with confidence uh because that’s the best way to approach uh this technology and so by having the right level of Education let’s say that
You’re more of a business leader and less of a technology uh leader in your organization but understanding enough of it having used it as uh my uh co-founders have said uh much more practically will make make you much more confident in making decisions around it so you’ll be a more
Modern uh business leader and obviously this technology allows you to be much more inclusive uh so Business Services support services that let’s say were very high cost and that you couldn’t deliver to people traditionally you can now so if you were building let’s say a service that was catering to uh you know
The very top uh of Executives and you were a consultant well now maybe your skill your your knowhow can be bodified and you can engage with a much broader set of customers and and I think the quality is also going to improve um and
So I think that uh folks have to sort of decide uh you know whether they’re going to stand on the sidelines of this technology and sort of see others leverage it to raise their career potential uh or whether they’re actually going to really Embrace this and we’ve built both uh executive education
Courses to help folks uh participate more on the technical side even if they’re non-technical uh leaders uh and of course we’ve we’ve we’ve built courseware that uh allows uh someone that’s really curious about its strategic importance so that they can provide let’s say AI uh transformation
In their company um and so we think that there’s something for all sorts of uh people but those are the primary um sort of user stories we’ve focused on but yeah people have to embrace this technology if they want to be um leaders uh in the um world of business certainly
And U you know technology goes without saying fantastic I fully agree we have received uh four fantastic questions from our students before uh we discuss them I have another question that I want to disc discussed with you Alexi so I as an educator myself I I’m too wondering
How to take advantage of AI I’ve been teaching courses on AI for many years however I also want to integrate AI in my teaching and I feel there are a lot of discussions around whether students use you know um AI to write seminar papers Bachelors Master thesis and then
Professors try to figure it out and penalize them so when I started with looking into cat GPT a year ago I changed the rules of how I supervise papers uh thesis and I told my students they’re not only allowed to use these tools I even require them to use them so
Probably they can submit submit better talk documents now we have that AI tutor with Quantic which can answer questions on how you know to do whatever would would our students also be allowed to use that chatbot in order to write their case studies that they need to submit uh
Have you changed the honor code around that and and how and would you encourage them to use the chatbot helping them to trough the solution for their case studies so yeah so I mean as you say many universities do seem to be focusing on the the student use of these
Technologies and worrying that um students students are using AI to do work for them or about plagiarism um and much of that focus seems to be on actually preventing students from using these new tools but kind of as you say you know for us we really want to teach
Students how to use these new technologies um as they arise to be prepared for the modern economy and so to answer your question more directly you know we we’ve opted for policies that explain how to site GPT queries um so to GPT or using um our own AI advisor
Um and we really want our students to feel comfortable using those um in order to create better work so we expect that when students go out into the job course that they’re they’re going to be using these these uh new features and so um for us it’s it’s much more about how do
How do you use them responsibly how do you let your instructor know that you’ve used them um but really becoming familiar with them and comfortable with them great uh now we have four questions from our students and one of the question is he or she says uh that he or
She is a current student and wondering if the tutor chatbot will still be available after graduation so can you still lock in and use it later yeah so I’ll I’ll take that one um yes you will have access um we’ve made AI advisor available to our alumni already and we
Would love this to become a resource that rumni return to in order to refresh knowledge um maybe practice uh Concepts that could be applicable to their jobs and we would love to hear from our current alumni about how they are currently using AI advisor or would like
To use it so we can continue making this an experience that’s helpful long past graduation great um so you you would be happy about feedback from the students and one question was also whether they can submit feedback in Su chest so how can they get in touch with you and
Submit their feedback yeah so the the easiest way to get feedback about um AI advisor responses is actually to use the thumbs up and thumbs down feature for any given response um but of course we always welcome other types of feedback and so if our students want to use the
Feedback tab email us any suggestions um or feedback any thoughts they have we love to hear that um you can also use uh slack of course I know many of our students have been giving us um feedback about AI advisor over slack so all of those are completely valid
Ways and and we would love to hear from you perfect um that sounds great um so ay can you tell us more about the chatbot does it answer questions in real time or is there a delay sure absolutely um so it is in real time um that actually having a very responsive live
Experience was one it was something that was very important to us um and so yes uh when when you’re speaking to AI advisor um it it is taking your question and actually your entire question history uh into account in real time and formulating the response and in fact we
Stream the response ultimately back to you uh in real time you see each character typed to the screen as it comes back uh an experience that I think is becoming increasingly familiar uh in bots so yes we we try to strive for an experience where there’s no waiting or
As little waiting as possible um so hopefully you can you can get the information you need or the experience that you were hoping for quick sounds great we have one more question and the student asks if there are any plans to update and improve the chatbot and its capabilities and knowledge bases
I think you definitely keep innovating all the time so I want to ref rephrase the question where do you want the chatbot and AI at Quantic to be say in two years five years and 10 years from now maybe Tom go ahead all of that is uh something we’re
Very passionate and excited about uh we have a whole Labs team that’s working on it we have a whole engineering team that’s exploring it so uh whether it’s on the content side um or on the um you know uh technology side we are working hard at it I we think that over the
Course of the next several quarters we’ll start doing more and more things uh in this domain um obviously there’s areas that are particularly uh exciting for us in terms of you know whether it’s the generative uh AI where you can create content uh or it’s some of the
Engagement uh AI where either it’s within the this advisor the AI advisor and other such formats uh we can deliver more individualized more customized responses um obviously all the time we’re trying to uh SS out how to grade and and score the quality of of our AI responses and
Because there’s a sort of more um varied nature um across the experience uh given that you know it’s very responsive uh that’s something also uh we’re exciting about but yeah now this is we’re all in on AI uh this is sort of the the the biggest opportunity we see uh not just
For us but uh just U you know the education industry uh at large great AI I have another question so today we’ve talked about how you build the AI advisor maybe you can tell us also how do you use AI personally as a CTO do you use AI to help you writing
Code for example uh yeah so um not just me but yeah on our our team we’ve we’ve certainly like many Engineers uh experimented quite a bit with using generative AI uh to help us in our our day-to-day engineering and coding work um that that I think uh is very exciting
But but I think what’s been kind of notable is how often we use it uh or at least some of us anyway will use it as a brainstorming partner so um if you’re just trying to you know think of certain ideas or maybe paths to take especially
If it’s you know anything that I think revolves around naming for example um it’s really a great sounding board uh and and sort of a creativity partner uh so I think that’s maybe one of the more perhaps unusual ways that uh I found it to be helpful as well great Alex how do
You plan to use the new technology say in collaboration with other universities have you been in touch with other universities are they curious about what you’re doing and they want to license your chatbot for their teaching as well so we haven’t um been in touch with other universities about that yet but we
Are actually trying to keep tabs on how other universities are using these Technologies we want to learn from others we hope others will become inspired by what we’re doing um and so it is it’s a really exciting time and we’re just hoping that more people jump into The Fray and start start trying
Some things well that sounds great so thanks for all your insights Tom ay and alexie uh our schedule time today is now coming to an end and I want to thank all of you for joining today both the audience as well as ay Tom and alexie um
A special Thanks goes to you for providing all these insights and uh I think what we all noticed is that Quantic is a very Innovative company and investing a lot in AI in order to stay at the Forefront of the Innovation and education which is a great thing uh for
Those who are already part of the Quantic community and you have a Quantic account take a look at the AI advisor you can sign in and ask any questions and see how it goes and provide feedback maybe you can also do a post on that on LinkedIn and if you’re not part of
Quantic yet give a shot at it I think there are so many new initiatives now not just the AI advisor also the uh executive programs as well as obviously the MBA programs which are very established now and uh give a shot at it and let us know how it goes as we
Conclude today’s webinar I aside from Quantic encourage you to stay curious AI is really changing our economy not just companies but our worldwide economy how we work how we think and so it’s impacting education and Beyond um keep an eye at Quantic I’m sure the next AI Innovations
Will happen here as well and thank you very much for joining us today everyone and have a fantastic day byebye thank you Patrick