Paola Sanmiguel, M.S. IDBT

This strategic shift doesn’t necessarily require academic disciplines to disappear, but rather to re-align w/ employability & market needs. There are two applicable examples: 1. Complement degree programs with rapidly updatable & rigorous certificates. As part of tuition they can augment student professional development. As stand-alone continuing education credits, they bring cash flow. 2. Review academic portfolio for offerings that can pívot as micro majors,Continuing Ed or certificates. Micro-majors distill key pedagogic goals providing context for students. They also broaden student learning with targeted precision. Continuing Ed and certificates amplifying academic reach & create revenue for under utilized teaching resources.

Rather than enhanced creativity, combining applicable AI insights w/ humans who are skilled & have the domain knowledge to choose & impactfully apply insights gives companies scalable and increasingly precise data sets to build products users need & pay for. Better design options will lead to more user/market-aligned products only if researchers, product owners & business units work to actively identify & execute on insights w/ a singular focus on user ROI. If you are solving the RIGHT problem in the most cost-effective way, you are designing for growth. Having & learning how to effectively choose from applicable insights is best achieved not solely w/ AI, but rather w/ an organizational structure & incentives to leverage AI profitably.

Having too many options or lacking clarity on how to determine insight ROI can turn design speed into decision paralysis. Rote business processes can be handled by machines—we can do this systemically w/o AI simply with automating. The real AI speed gains in design come from understanding the outcomes for users (and therefore sales) and leveraging those insights to improve offerings and gain competitive advantage. What does that mean in practice today? Coordinating & continually improving three key areas: 1. Leveraging business automation to gain speed & improve repetitive tasks. 2. Build infrastructure that delivers contextual & applicable insights for your product/market 3. Develop human intelligence alongside AI to define insight ROI.

It’s key to understand, however, that the delivery of these kinds of results are entirely predicated on a properly trained AI model and the tooling to extract, analyze and apply insights. The latter is easer said than done, despite the barrage of AI entrepreneurs & established companies rushing to deliver usable intelligence. Like every other technology model, usable & effective AI is entirely dependent on its source and implementation in your product org & product/service design. Without the correct infrastructure you may not derive usable intelligence. But even if you do obtain actionable insights, they are unimpactful to your users & revenue stream if your engineering & product organizations are not primed & incentivized for innovation.

While giving effective feedback is important, teaching your mentee to learn from your feedback is crucial. I actually encourage my mentees to test their hypothesis, behaviors & views to learn from their own experience. Once mentees get to know themselves better through experimentation, their experiences are likely to inform or validate feedback or previous knowledge/advice I shared. This technique makes them a partner in their development rather than an observer. Learning how learn is the ultimate goal of mentoring and one that requires both giving and receiving feedback as a mentor. Growth is about taking risks & learning from them both as a mentor & mentee.

More importantly, always be authentic. If you are a mentor, you prioritize your mentees growth, act as a facilitator, sounding board and deliver a reality check when needed. But YOU must first care, truly care about the outcome for your mentee, on their terms. Releasing your ego is the first step. Mentoring is not about you, your views, experience or expertise. It’s about filtering your lived experience through the eyes of your mentee; their world, challenges, gifts and goals. A truly great mentor acts as a symphony conductor—coordinating, refining and elevating an existing composition. Build new habits, learnings, open horizons and co-create action plans. Once you’ve built that connection from an authentic place, online or IRL will work.