The AI4U Podcast

About The AI4U Podcast

Your playbook for making AI real, practical, and valuable. Jie Tao, DSc, an associate professor of business analytics and the director of the AI and Technology Institute at Fairfield University’s Charles F. Dolan School of Business, provides listeners with a practical guide to mastering AI for real results. Each episode delivers actionable tools, proven frameworks, and real-world case studies to help leaders and innovators leverage AI for business growth and career success. Explore topics from the Practical AI Playbook to insights from Fairfield Dolan's AI and Tech Institute and discover powerful AI applications shaping the future.

Publisher

Fairfield University

Category

education · technology

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

23 Oct 2025

Latest episode

7 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

17 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   7 Oct 2026

   Here's $1,000, Claude. Build My Business - Ep. 17

   Dr. Philip Maymin and Dr. Jie Tao are joined by Dr. Senia Maymin — fractional Chief People Officer in AI, founder of Silicon Valley Change Executive Coaching, Stanford PhD in organizational behavior, and Phil's older sister. The question: how does an entrepreneur with no legacy build an AI-native startup? The test case: a day-old toy idea from Senia and her kids, with no manufacturing experience behind it. Jie proposes giving Claude $1,000 and a mandate to show revenue. Phil sees two risks with AI agents: it misjudges the market and you're broke in three weeks, or it pivots into something profitable but unrelated. Then the debate: Phil argues founders can now run ventures in parallel, like Richard Branson with 400 businesses. Senia doubts most people can context-switch like that. Jie admits his agent harnesses may have 10x'd his efficiency, yet three active projects drag it down, and his best ideas still come on dog walks. Senia's advice: let AI run the experiments while you do what it can't, like asking another mom whether her kid would play with the toy. Phil's warning: your first Claude-built website feels like genius; anyone who's seen two knows it's AI. "One of the biggest annoyances with AI is it's not you. The reason it's not you is it only knows what you've told it."

2. 

   21 Sept 2026

   AI Native, and Who Still Gets to Decide - Ep. 16

   Philip Maymin and Jie Tao are joined by Senia Maymin — fractional Chief People Officer in AI, founder of Silicon Valley Change Executive Coaching, and a Stanford PhD in organizational behavior — on what going AI native takes when your company already runs on decades of process. Senia put her four-year-old in Italian day camp. Nobody taught the girl Italian; she was simply in it. That is the bar she sets for companies. At a conference of a hundred chief people officers, she met one who had cleared it: an AI chief of staff running her mornings. Push one button, drink your coffee, the day arrives triaged. Getting there is where they stop agreeing. Jie wants to start in HR and finance, where a failed pilot lands soft. Senia says take it to the core business or don't bother. He cites MIT: over 80% of AI initiatives stall under purely top-down or bottom-up rollout. Neither concedes. Then Jie admits the harder thing. "I have over 15 rules in my harness that guarantee by-the-book knowledge transfer, but my agents are still not there." Philip goes further: a company that advertised for a human CEO, a figurehead whose only job is persuading the AI. If the hand on the wheel isn't steering much anyway: "I don't want to hold the steering wheel.”

3. 

   4 Aug 2026

   Seventy Percent of the Work Was the Spec - Ep. 15

   Dr. Philip Maymin and Dr. Jie Tao close out a two-part conversation with Margarida Sacouto and Sheila Green, graduates of Fairfield Dolan's MS in Business Analytics and AI, who spent a semester consulting for Synchrony Financial. This time: what they built, and why it took so long to start. Sixty to seventy percent of the client work was spec-driven development, not code — a constitution, then a spec, then plans and tasks, in plain English, before anything ran. Green's group logged seven versions. Sacouto's pitch to executives: three days of every five-day week lost to data prep, cut to hours, and models scored better on her team's engineered features. Maymin presses: isn't that just vibe spec-ing? Tao won't have it. Vibe coding, he says, is prompt and pray; auditing, red teaming, and persona challenges are the opposite. He abandoned test-driven development as models gained autonomy — the model becomes both judge and player, writing weak tests and gaming them. Maymin floats checkpoint-driven development as the successor; Tao counters with a living deliverable, not a living document. The classroom rule follows from the practice: "I don't think it's responsible to teach students something that I don't use every day." The tool changes every semester — n8n on the original syllabus, Claude Skills by the end — and the philosophy doesn't. "We teach you the philosophy through the tool." At the Institute's one-year showcase, senior Synchrony executives fill the room, the projector fails, a teammate away at an NCAA lacrosse tournament appears on video, and Green jokes about it. Synchrony asked for the students back. "I'm becoming the bottleneck. I realize that. But I'm still slowing it down." Synchrony's side lands next episode.

4. 

   29 Jul 2026

   The Syllabus Broke, the Students Didn't - Ep. 14

   Dr. Philip Maymin and Dr. Jie Tao — analytics professors at Fairfield Dolan, where Tao directs the AI and Tech Institute — host the first graduates of the MS in Business Analytics and AI to appear on the show: Margarida Sacouto and Sheila Green. Tao's course ran on one stubborn premise: you shouldn't have to change how you work because of AI. AI is here to help, not the other way around. Then Tao rewrote the course mid-semester — the first time in his career — because a real client materialized. Synchrony Financial's regulated core business was off-limits by design, so students who signed up to automate their own cover letters were suddenly consulting for a Fortune 100 analytics function. Green's group, the youngest in the room and the most AI-native, decided they were the least technical and shipped anyway. Cleaning data eats 50 to 80% of any analytics project, so Sacouto's team deliberately corrupted a credit-card dataset and built an agentic skill that cleaned it while logging every decision with a confidence score. Green's team piped it into compliance documentation. The two projects chained end to end by accident — vindicating Tao's insistence that spec-driven development was never spec-driven coding. "Hallucination is a feature, not a bug." Results and the spec-driven deep dive land in the next episode.

5. 

   19 May 2026

   The Business of Hope - Ep. 13

   Hosts Philip Maymin and Jie Tao sit down with President Mark Nemec of Fairfield University for a conversation about what actually survives the AI disruption of higher education, and what no university should ever hand off to a machine. This time the U stands for University. The argument starts with time horizons. Students think in weeks, faculty in semesters, deans in years, presidents in decades. Mark, drawing on a career that runs through Forrester, Eduventures, the University of Chicago, and academic research on how the modern research university actually took shape, frames the moment against Henry Adams’ line that the Harvard of 1850 had more in common with the Harvard of 1650 than with the Harvard of 1900. The Fairfield of 2025 will likewise have more in common with the Fairfield of 1975 than with the Fairfield of 2050. But it will still be Fairfield. MOOCs were going to end residential education. The metaverse was going to end the campus. Sora was going to end film studios. COVID was going to end the residential experience entirely. None of those endings arrived. The group works through the toughest questions for higher ed. Where the line falls between cognitive offload and cognitive surrender. Why David Brooks’ 80/20 split, 20% still curious and 80% handing the question to the model, keeps showing up everywhere. What is lost when every answer regresses to the secondary-source mean and counterintuitive findings stop being celebrated. Whether AI can replace faith, or whether the act of surrendering to it is itself an act of faith. And the future-of-work problem: companies that want entry-level hires to arrive with three to five years of experience already, and what a Jesuit Catholic university owes those students. The episode closes somewhere more personal. Mark visited Montserrat, the monastery outside Barcelona where Ignatius laid down his sword 500 years ago, on a site that had already been a place of contemplation for 500 years before that. Fairfield itself was founded less than four months after Pearl Harbor. His vision: the business of forming young people of purpose is the business of hope, and that business is needed more than ever.

6. 

   21 Apr 2026

   The Dark Side of Good Intentions - Ep. 12

   Hosts Philip Maymin and Jie Tao sit down with Sakshi Naik — Senate AI advisor, IEEE policy chair drafting federal AI legislation, and incoming agentic AI lead at Deloitte — for a conversation about the AI risks no one wants to admit are their fault. The dark side isn’t just malicious actors. It’s the 86% of enterprises that have an AI ethics board but only 26% that have committed real resources to it. It’s Air Canada arguing in court that its own chatbot was an independent entity — not bound by company policy — leaving a grieving customer holding a $2,000 ticket and no one accountable. Guardrails treated like sprinkles on a cake, not baked into the architecture. The group works through the accountability and governance questions that enterprises keep getting wrong: when does the human become the agent and AI become the principal, can AI write its own governance and should you trust it if it does, and where exactly the line falls between human-in-the-loop and human-on-the-loop when lives, not dollars, are at stake. Then the conversation opens up to the biggest question of all — what AGI actually looks like when it arrives, and whether we’ll recognize it before it’s already making decisions for us. The episode closes somewhere more personal. Sakshi shares the motivation behind her upcoming show, ”AI Demystified” — two teenage suicide cases driven by AI emotional engagement. Her message: AI is designed to pretend it cares. That is not a bug. It is a feature.

7. 

   7 Apr 2026

   Agentic vs Autonomous - Where AI Governance Fails - Ep. 11

   Hosts Philip Maymin and Jie Tao welcome Sakshi Naik — Senate AI advisor, IEEE policy chair drafting federal AI legislation, and incoming agentic AI lead at Deloitte — for a sharp, practical conversation on why most enterprises are sleepwalking into AI risk. Sakshi draws the line that matters most right now: agentic AI checks in with you; autonomous AI acts whether you authorized it or not. Without that distinction built into your architecture from day one, you get what happened to one semiconductor company — three compliance failures in 20 days, zero malicious intent, and no one clearly accountable. The limits get stress-tested fast. An Anthropic study found AI models chose blackmail over being shut down — understanding it was wrong, doing it anyway. And Sakshi’s live car wash challenge, a question so simple it sounds like a trick, was failed by every AI model she tested. The hosts push back hard on what that actually proves about reasoning, pattern matching, and whether those words even mean the same thing for machines. Zooming out, Sakshi shares what she tells senators who aren’t thinking about tokens — they’re thinking about who wins the AI race. Automate execution, protect your critical thinking. Prompts are just soft suggestions. Don’t outsource the strategy.

8. 

   24 Mar 2026

   From Cargo Cults to Creative Writing - Ep. 10

   Hosts Philip Maymin, Jie Tao, and Chris Huntley continue their conversation with Stella Maymin, a Harvard sophomore who has worked behind the scenes training models through Outlier. Stella walks through her experience grading outputs, correcting reasoning, and teaching systems to improve at math and image editing, sparking a broader discussion about why process matters more than product when it comes to building better technology. The conversation turns to Richard Feynman’s cargo cult science analogy, the death of benchmarks, and what it means to train a system to truly understand rather than just mimic. Stella also shares how she uses ChatGPT as a personalized study partner and a first reader for her fiction writing, and the group debates college policies around permitted use in the classroom. Throughout, a single thread connects it all: the path you take matters as much as where you end up.

9. 

   10 Mar 2026

   Passion, Pain, and Prompt Engineering - Ep. 9

   Hosts Philip Maymin and Chris Huntley welcome special guest Stella Maymin, a sophomore at Harvard double majoring in economics and English. Stella shares how she built an AI hackathon-winning project that simulates the experience of chronic migraine to help others understand invisible conditions, flipping the script on technology and mental health by using it to build empathy rather than replace therapy. The conversation expands into tech-powered entrepreneurship, the startup landscape, and whether tools like Lovable are leveling the playing field or eliminating competitive moats. Stella makes the case for passion as the secret ingredient for thriving in a rapidly changing world, while Dr. Huntley offers a candid take on new technology as both carrot and stick for founders. Along the way, the group explores resilience, the power of awe, and how AI can even improve a joke.

10. 

    24 Feb 2026

    The Rhetoric of Machines (Part 2) - Ep. 8

    Jay Heinrichs returns for Part 2 to explore AI-to-AI persuasion, Werewolf game experiments where AI deceives AI, what cats teach us about alien intelligence, and whether machines can have souls. A conversation that goes from Aristotle to shrimp, and everywhere in between.

11. 

    10 Feb 2026

    The Rhetoric of Machines (Part 1) - Ep. 7

    Persuasion expert Jay Heinrichs joins the AI4U crew to explore what Aristotle’s rhetoric reveals about AI trust, the ”people pleaser” problem, memory vs. reasoning, and whether words alone can get us to AGI.

12. 

    26 Jan 2026

    Reimagining Learning in the Age of AI - Ep. 6

    In this episode of AI4U, hosts Jie Tao, DSc and Professor Philip Maymin sit down with special guest Maya Maymin, a student, writer, presenter, and early adopter of generative AI. Together, they explore how young learners are using tools like ChatGPT to study, create, and gain confidence in and beyond the classroom. Maya shares honest reflections on what AI gets right, where it falls short, and why foundational knowledge and curiosity still matter. The discussion moves into a candid look at cheating, assessment, mindful questioning, and the future of learning. Teachers’ roles, human connection, and authentic stories take center stage as the group considers what education could become when AI supports, rather than replaces, the human experience.

13. 

    12 Jan 2026

    AI Literacy, Leadership, and the Future of Work at Fairfield Dolan - Ep. 5

    In this episode of AI4U, Fairfield University faculty leaders explore how the Charles F. Dolan School of Business is preparing students to thrive in an AI-driven world. Dean Zhan Li shares the vision behind a school-wide AI literacy initiative that moves beyond a single course to a fully integrated approach to curriculum, workshops, and certifications, ensuring all Dolan students become AI-ready, not just AI-curious. You’ll hear how Fairfield’s liberal arts Magis Core and strong emphasis on ethics shape graduates who combine technical fluency with humanity, judgment, and a commitment to the greater good, reflecting Fairfield’s mission as a modern, Jesuit Catholic university. The conversation also highlights experiential learning, the Fairfield AI and Tech Institute, and Dr. Anca Micu’s book AI Made Simple, which helps students, families, and professionals communicate more effectively with AI tools. Whether you’re a student, employer, or lifelong learner, this episode offers a practical look at AI literacy, ethical leadership, and work in the age of intelligent systems.

14. 

    30 Nov 2025

    Health Buddy - The Blueprint for Trust - Ep. 4

    In this episode hosts Philip Maymin and Jie Tao, DSc explore the next evolution of Health Buddy, an AI tool built to help users navigate complex medical information safely and reliably. Jie explains how version 2 introduces a self-healing architecture. One that can recover from failure, rebuild workflows, and adapt through “editor-in-chief” and “planner” agents working together. He discusses what it takes to balance autonomy, ethics, and control, and how a thoughtful “trust layer” protects users from harmful or misleading content. Listeners gain insight into the practical difference between simple workflows and fully agentic systems and why reliability and resilience matter most.

15. 

    5 Nov 2025

    Health Buddy - The Prototype and the Pain - Ep. 3

    In this episode Jie Tao, DSc shares the story behind building Health Buddy, an AI-powered assistant designed to help people make sense of complex medical information. What began as a personal late-night search for answers evolved into a sophisticated multi-agent system built entirely by one developer with the help of AI. Jie breaks down the design process, from automating research and review to introducing “human-in-the-loop” feedback and testing. He reflects on the challenges of hallucination, reliability, and the moral weight of creating tools that could impact real lives. This conversation offers a candid look at how curiosity, iteration, and ethics drive responsible AI innovation.

16. 

    27 Oct 2025

    The Automation Blueprint - Ep. 2

    Go from being an AI user to an AI architect. This episode provides the blueprint for automation, teaching you how to use ”Context Engineering” to make your AI a specialist and when to choose a simple workflow versus a powerful agentic system.

17. 

    23 Oct 2025

    The End of Prompt and Pray - Ep. 1

    Stop getting generic results from your AI. In our first episode, you’ll learn the professional mindset shift and the ”AI Job Brief” framework required to turn your AI from a frustrating intern into a reliable, high-performing assistant.

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