At its first HBS Leadership Breakfast event since before the pandemic, the HBS Association of Orange County (HBSAOC) tackled the potential of AI with a talk titled The Dawning of Artificial Intelligence: Truth vs. Hype, by Marshall Toplansky (MBA 1976), known as the “Innovation Professor” at the Argyros College of Business and Economics at Chapman University in Orange, California.

The sold-out morning event was held on February 14 on the Chapman campus. Over 70 HBS alumni and guests, Harvard affiliates, Chapman faculty and students, and local business professionals attended the talk while enjoying a full breakfast, according to club president Karen Hernandez (MBA 2000), who organized the event with Toplansky, a member of the HBSAOC board.

Toplansky’s presentation addressed many common questions about the potential positive and negative impacts of AI, from how it will improve business to how it might affect humanity in general.

“Everybody is up in arms about how AI—particularly generative AI—is going to do everything from ruining education to getting rid of creativity with all sorts of negative consequences,” Toplansky says. “My point was that this is a critical part of future business strategy.”

He described six different business strategies where AI—through predictive analytics and automation—will that make businesses significantly more productive and responsive to consumer needs.

“It would be awfully nice to be able to use data and predictive power to get computers to say ‘we recognize this pattern, we’ve seen this before, we should do x instead of y.’ It would get us there faster, more predictably, consistently and cheaper,” says Toplansky.

He adds that questions of how trustworthy and unbiased AI will be can’t yet be answered.

“The technology is like a day and a half old,” he says. “We’re just starting. But the more data that AI can consume and organize, the more likely it is to be representative of the world. So this problem will sort itself out.”

Touching on issues of privacy, Toplansky says “we kind of need to get over it. The fact is we’re not going to have AI unless we allow AI to surveil what we’re doing. Yes, you’re going to lose some privacy, but you’re going to get more relevant services from businesses because of that. If you’re willing to share intimate details about yourself to a human salesperson because you want to be served better with products and services, what’s the difference in sharing it with an AI? In fact, maybe the AI will be a little more discreet.”

Hernandez and Toplansky both say they were excited to see the sell-out crowd for the club’s reboot of the Leadership Breakfast, and noted that they saw many younger and recent HBS alumni who were likely attracted by the topic of AI.

“Marshall truly demystified it for so many of us. AI is really a way to make better decisions faster, based on real data,” says Hernandez. “We had a very lively conversation, and many people came up afterwards, asking when is the next one!”

The HBS Business and Environment Initiative (BEI) and the HBS Club of Washington, DC (HBSDC) recently co-hosted a fireside chat on climate and inequality, featuring HBS Professor Debora Spar, Senior Associate Dean for Business in Global Society, and Audrey Choi (MBA 2004), the Former Chief Sustainability Officer at Morgan Stanley.

The chat, titled Inequality and Climate Change: Implications for Business Policy and Action, attracted 85 alumni and guests to the University Club in DC on February 26, according to co-organizers Raj Patil (OPM 42, 2012), president of the HBSDC, and Patrick Coady (MBA 1966), who is the events chair for the club’s Environment and Climate Initiative.

The conversation focused on helping business leaders and policymakers understand the disproportionate impacts of climate change on low income and marginalized communities. Spar and Choi touched on a range of issues, including the vital importance of trees for poor urban areas, the changing needs for insurance due to climate change, and the impact of climate change on the real estate industry.

“This was our tenth event on environment and climate, and definitely a marquee event for us,” says Patil. “We had people from government, policy, banking, and industry associations. It was a diverse group, and we saw many young alumni as well.”

Coady says the program was part of the BEI’s Alumni in Climate Networking Series, aimed at engaging HBS alumni in conversations around climate leadership and solutions. “We’ve worked closely with the school and the BEI on other events, to get ideas and connect with faculty,” he says. “We worked with them to invite interested alumni from around the DC area, and it was certainly encouraging to us that so many people attended.”

In addition to hosting several virtual events for the Climate Networking Series, the BEI took the series on the road this year, for in-person conversations on climate solutions. So far, it has hosted events with alumni clubs in Boston, New York, San Francisco, and Switzerland as well as DC. Stops in Chicago and London are forthcoming, and plans are underway for more clubs visits in the future.

“This networking series came about after we hosted the Accelerating Climate Solutions Conference at HBS last May,” says Courtney Fairbrother, associate director of the BEI. “It was meant to give alumni a roadmap for addressing climate change. More than 300 alumni attended. Coming out of that, we wanted to find a way to continue to engage alumni. The goal of the whole series is to bring together alumni who are working on climate solutions and make sure they can connect with each other and with the school.”

For more information about the Alumni in Climate Networking Series and upcoming climate-focused events, visit the HBS Business and Environment Initiative (BEI) website.

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