Explore the power, potential, and risks of AI technologies and how to leverage it in your organization to gain a competitive edge.

Harnessing AI for Breakthrough Innovation and Strategic Impact delivers a curriculum unlike any other — created and taught by world-renowned faculty from across the Stanford campus. You’ll gain multiple perspectives and insights from the leading minds in AI, strategy, innovation, technology, ethics, and more. It’s a uniquely Stanford experience on a topic that’s essential for today’s business leaders.

The curriculum has been thoughtfully designed to marry technology, practical applications, and potential consequences with business objectives and opportunities. Learn how to communicate with technology teams and make the case for the most effective investments in AI. Take part in an interdisciplinary and interactive learning experience with faculty lectures and discussions, guest speakers, an AI lab visit, and group projects with peers.

Each day of your program is carefully structured, combining theory with practice, to help you apply newfound knowledge in your own organization.

Mornings

• Gain a high-level understanding of key AI technologies and their applications.
• Understand how Machine Learning translates data into models that can make inferences. Real-world application: real estate sales price predictions
• Discover how perception technologies translate sensor information into an understanding of the world. Real-world applications: facial recognition, medical image diagnostics
• Understand how language-based AI technology interprets and generates natural language. Real-world applications: translation, chatbots like Chat GPT
• Explore how autonomous technologies make robust decisions from uncertain data. Real-world application: automated driving

Afternoons

• Discover best practices on how companies are currently using AI with case studies and industry guest speakers.
• Use design thinking methodology to develop potential AI applications for your organization that are strategically aligned with your business goals.
• Learn how to improve communication with your technology teams to enhance understanding and implementation.
• Weigh the ethical, legal, economic, and social implications of AI to better anticipate consequences in your own organization.
• Capture your learnings and review key takeaways.
• Brainstorm with peers and share ideas for implementing AI in your own organization.

Below are just a few of the sessions you’ll attend as part of the program.

Crucial Questions for Success of AI Applications

In theory, AI algorithms can be applied to a wide set of problems of importance to humanity. In practice, however, technology itself is only a small portion of the overall success of an application.

In this session, we’ll discuss the crucial issues that must be addressed in most successful applications of AI, which include quality, robustness, usability, optimal mix of humans and automation, trust, evolution, and economics.

The Future of the Workplace

The only thing predictable about the future of work is that there will be lots of change. One day you read that there is a looming labor shortage as the population ages, the next you read that mass unemployment is right around the corner due to the advent of robots and other AI.

In this session, we’ll look at trends in the labor market and the future of work and consider how demographic changes present business and labor market opportunities, as well as challenges. Will the robots really come and, if so, what are the implications for today’s employers? We’ll discuss how the answers to these and related questions vary by labor market and by what expertise in AI your company needs. We’ll also consider how the nature of future working relationships will be different due to the disruptions caused by COVID, even when the pandemic is long gone.

Machine Learning Overview and Application

In these sessions, we will discuss a high-level overview of machine learning and its applications to AI. We’ll cover recent advances and how they relate to classic techniques in learning, discussing limitations and risks.

We will also review recent applications of AI, focusing on the challenges and pitfalls that arise when guiding and managing AI implementation and attempting to apply the technology “out of the box.”