Course Description:

Artificial Intelligence (AI) is changing how value is created and captured in the economy

One critical change: You have your direct labor, and also your indirect labor through the data generated by your work. The value of labor shifts from renting embodied expertise to selling

codified capabilities. These capabilities can be recombined with other capabilities, enhanced over time, duplicated at no cost and commoditized to destroy its uniqueness and value

This change could shift how you should navigate your career and develop and value your expertise. The lessons will be useful to anyone entering today’s labor market, entrepreneurs starting new ventures, and investors. Students will develop their strategy through simulated negotiation exercises, experience from guest speakers, and practice in the field along-side experts.

Learning Objectives:

To get a sense for the fundamental shift in negotiating today’s labor market, consider the following: in today’s environment, your expertise can be codified. Consider the new Tom Hank’s film Here (2024), where an AI model of Tom’s acting expertise can be used to face-swap and de-age him. Using similar technology, the emails, presentations and digital trail of your judgement on-the-job can be transformed into a model of your expertise that is disembodied, scaled, recombined and sold. How should you manage, price and negotiate over the data generated by your work? What if instead, you find yourself the owner of data generated by people you employ? How should you use it to remain competitive? What are the legal, ethical and social implications of the choices you make? We will use theory and evidence from economics, law, and psychology to understand what your best strategy is, and to anticipate how the labor market and economy will be transformed by these negotiations in aggregate.

Using the lessons and frameworks we develop from examining the development of AI and data technologies we will examine individual choices you will need to make in an AI enabled world. These could include how you should use the technologies to clone your own expertise, how you should negotiate the rights to your codified labor and how you should navigate employment contracts or other business agreements over your direct labor and any data byproduct that can be used to train AI models. We will also re-think the power of collective action in securing these rights in a changing environment. Throughout, students will develop a process for recognizing the elements that have, and have not, changed fundamentally in the era of information access and exploitation.

Career Focus

This course is designed to help students consider how to develop and value their expertise in a world where cognitive skills that were exclusively embodied are increasingly being built into models that can be scaled and continue to learn.

Faculty Expertise

Prof Cullen is a leading labor economist whose research covers the impact of information and AI for firms, employees, and entrepreneurs. Prof Ghosh has been teaching courses on entrepreneurship and technology. He has built leading companies in the transition to the mobile and Internet economies. More recently he has been studying the development of AI and its likely social and business implications. Professors Cullen and Ghosh have designed this course to explore the implications of data and AI on the job market and offer practical insights to students who are entering the work force.

Structure:

The course is 6 modules with a mix of case and project-based learning exercises.

Module 1: In what direction is valued expertise heading, and over what time horizon? We will study the case of Klarna, a successful FinTech company that cut employment by half as AI technologies have been instituted across functions. We will place the adoption patterns we observe in historical context by examining past episode of general purpose technologies. With the future of Klarna in mind, we ask you to consider how to describe your own expertise as a job applicant.

Module 2: Codifying your own expertise: After discovering the power of harnessing AI technology to sell your expertise and job marketability, we will be joined by the founder and CEO of Delphi.ai, cutting edge technology allowing you to build your many clones of expertise. The goal of this session is to set students up to create valuable models that pave the way toward selling expertise and marketing ones potential. On a practical note, this session will give students the tools necessary to deliver their final project: a set of clones, their resumes and a career strategy.

Module 3: The revolution of the knowledge-service industries: We will examine the organizational and technological changes taking place in the consulting industry. Joined by leaders at BCG and McKinsey, we will discover the jagged frontier of AI capabilities replacing and enhancing MBA skillsets. We will construct the short, medium and long-run potential for the organization of consulting services and the role of the newly minted MBA.

Module 4: Negotiated value: In this session we compare and contrast the value extracted by the creative expertise, as a function of negotiated rights. By examining the music industry and Hollywood entertainment industry, we explore how technology does not define the winners and losers, but the institutions and contracts negotiated fundamentally shift who can extract value. Negotiated rights also define the incentivize structure for the future development of valuable expertise, and the market structure for labor. We will be joined by the Chief Negotiator of the Hollywood Writers’ Guild to explore the tactics for negotiating rights and value.

Module 5: AI organizations: We will continue to develop codifying our expertise by combining clones to form an organization. We will have a case discussion of the platform facilitating entire organization of AI clones. We will then use the platform to build an organization of clones that can make decisions over resources. By the end of class, student will all be able to conceive of “1-person unicorns,” to quote Sam Altman. These tools will further student final projects.

Module 6: Re-imaging your expertise, resume and career trajectory: In this class students will present their final projects in small groups. The projects will display the nature of expertise, codified, replicated, recombined and deployed. Students will demonstrate the use of these clones in their AI-forward resumes, and the career strategy that makes use of these new valuable assets.

Evaluation:

Participation in class discussions: 50%

Final Project: 50%

Describe your career strategy

• Digital clones or agents that codify your capabilities
• Resume that includes how you can scale your expertise
• Terms on which you are willing to offer your capabilities