At the Money: Preparing for a Career in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
At The Money: Preparing for a Career During in Age of Artificial Intelligence (October 29, 2026)
Full transcript below .
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About this week’s guest:
Nitin Nohria is former Dean of the Harvard Business School , where he is still a professor. He is the author of The CEO: The Role, the Reality, the Responsibility
For more info, see:
Professional Bio
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Nitin Nohria: Preparing for a Career in the Age of AI
Barry Ritholtz in conversation with Nitin Nohria, former dean of Harvard Business School and author of The CEO: The Role, the Reality, and the Responsibility. Bloomberg Radio.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: In the age of artificial intelligence, how should students prepare for this job market? Let’s bring in Harvard Professor Nitin Nohria. He’s former dean of the Harvard Business School. His new book is The CEO: The Role, the Reality, and the Responsibility. He’s also executive chairman at Thrive Capital, which is the venture firm run by Joshua Kushner. So let’s start with AI. If artificial intelligence is attacking that entry rung of the career ladder, how should recent college grads build the skills and judgment that used to come from those entry-level jobs?
NITIN NOHRIA: First, students should continue to use their time during their education to be even more determined to cultivate critical thinking — the capacity to interrogate themselves. When I teach cases now, one thing I’ve started to do is to ask students, “Tell me what AI said about this case.” Actually, not just tell me — read to me what your AI agent said to you about this case. Because I want them to know you can use these tools. In fact, you’ll be required to use these tools when you get to work.
NITIN NOHRIA: And then I ask them the second question: What did you agree with? What did you disagree with? What further questions did you ask to get your thinking to be improved? I think this form of critical reasoning — where we rely upon AI to inform ourselves, but then we interrogate it deeply, and we learn how to think alongside it — this is a capability that they will be required to have, and I think the best students will prepare themselves this way.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: So your preference is, rather than just become a very inch-wide, mile-deep domain expert, really have the broad meta-skills — critical reading, critical thinking, and a more intelligent form of learning and working with AI. Is that the takeaway?
NITIN NOHRIA: I think so. My view increasingly is that you should think of AI very much like in the Marvel comics. Each person can develop their own superpower. You don’t need a Marvel suit; AI becomes the equivalent of your Marvel suit. But you have to tune it to yourself, right? It’s not like all Marvel heroes have the same superpowers. You will develop your own superpowers, and that’ll be your distinctive edge. How you use this extraordinary capacity to distinguish yourself, to make yourself special — that will be the new edge that people will have to find.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: So, undergraduate: does the major a student takes really matter? We saw such a push towards STEM, but now it seems a lot of those technical skills are getting commoditized. How should a student be thinking about what they should be studying, how they develop judgment and communication skills? How important is the major?
NITIN NOHRIA: In the same metaphor that I used — you have to find what your unique Marvel superpower is — expertise could be one of them. It is not the case that expertise disappears. If you end up being the person who has dug deep into computer science, and you can therefore answer questions about the right way to program using AI, about the right way to create safety — all of the questions that are now being worked on by the leading researchers at the top labs — that’s not something that I, who doesn’t have that same level of intuition, experience, and expertise, will be able to do.
NITIN NOHRIA: For others, it may be writing. For others, it may be history. So I do think that a major will continue to be important. But then there will be people who take interdisciplinary majors — like Social Studies at Harvard — who say, “I’m not going to differentiate myself on expertise, because that will be for some people. I’m going to be the generalist.” And I think that being a generalist is going to be deeply important in this world too.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Yeah, no doubt. So let’s talk about that first job, which, when I was coming up, was described as the all-important first job. Is that still the case? Should people think about that first gig out of college as something that’s a little bit of an experiment, to figure out what they like and what they’re good at? Or should it be a commitment to the company, to the industry, to their bosses — just jump in with both feet? Or somewhere in between?
NITIN NOHRIA: In my experience, having taught for now almost 40 years — I teach mostly business school students, who are graduate students, but I’ve also had interaction with lots of undergraduate students — I find that students are of two types. There are people who, somewhere very early in their life, know exactly what their life’s mission is. I’ve always said to those people: get on with it. Find a place, commit, dig deep, because you already know what you want to do. Don’t waste time flitting around running experiments. The experiment of your life is already known. Now you have to find a way to deliver on it.
NITIN NOHRIA: And there are other people — and I will put myself in that category — who didn’t have a clue about what I wanted to do when I joined an undergraduate institution. Didn’t even have a clue when I went to graduate school, and had to discover through experimentation what it was that I was going to be good at. For those people, I say: don’t be afraid of experimentation. Don’t get anxious that you don’t know exactly what you want to do. But when you get the signal that this is what you want to do, listen hard. Your body, mind, and heart will tell you that this is what you were meant to do. And when that happens, lock in and pursue it with all your heart. But don’t get impatient if you don’t know very early on what it is that you want to do, and cut yourself some grace.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really interesting advice. So, you’re executive chairman of a venture capital firm. I’ve played around in that space over the years, and one of the things I’m kind of fascinated by is how often startups — really very new companies — pivot from the initial idea to a variation, to a derivative of the original technology, and sometimes to something entirely different. How should students and new grads think about those career pivots? How should they think about, “Hey, is this just tough and I have to fight my way through? Or am I really more interested in this adjacent area of practice?”
NITIN NOHRIA: For entrepreneurs, there’s a level of persistence and a willingness to pivot as needed, because there’s such a determination to come up with the right solution for a problem that may initially have presented as A, but over time looks like it’s its adjacency. A colleague of mine, Amar Bhidé, did research at Harvard Business School on hundreds of entrepreneurs, and he found that in 80% of the cases, as you said, where they ended up was a distant cousin at best of what they started with — even when they were successful. And I think that’s not very different from people who pursue careers.
NITIN NOHRIA: Even if you’re not an entrepreneur, where you start may not be where you end up in your career. You may start as a consultant because that feels like the right way to gain some experience. You may start as a journalist, and you could end up in very different places. So I think people should remain permanently open to exploring adjacencies that they’re drawn to — and certainly to recognizing when what they’re doing is a dead end and it’s not going to actually yield anything. It’s the hardest thing for people to do sometimes, to recognize a dead end. But I also say to people: don’t be too quick to allow irritations or frictions to be seen as a dead end.
NITIN NOHRIA: So I say to people, if you’re unhappy, allow yourself to be unhappy for at least three to six months before you decide that this is a dead end. Because if you switch every time you experience unhappiness, you’re just never going to have the persistence to work through the things that you have to work through in almost any job or any career.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: That persistence reminds me of a quote I’ve heard about so many different areas, and I want to see how much it applies to a career: it should be treated as a marathon, not a sprint. True?
NITIN NOHRIA: One hundred percent. And yet, as you know, a marathon is not run at the same pace.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Sure.
NITIN NOHRIA: If you see the great runners in a marathon, they try and set the pace early. So sometimes you want to actually set the pace early. In the middle of the race you might slow down, but you’re always trying to set a pace. At times you want to run with the group; at times you want to run alone. So yes, a marathon is a long race, but it’s not run at the same cadence throughout. I think that’s what a good career looks like as well.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Tell us about experiential learning. How should universities and students design higher education so that students really get the most out of their four years or so in college, and are best prepared for a career?
NITIN NOHRIA: I’m a huge proponent of experiential learning — but, full disclosure, I’m very biased in this regard. I think the case method that we taught by at Harvard Business School was an opportunity for students to confront experience in the classroom. In many ways, I used to think of it as the best flight simulation that you could have in business. We can’t possibly put you into a hundred business situations in the real world, but we can give you 90 minutes of simulation of different business problems. And in each case, you have to act as the protagonist. You have to think about the problem with no solution given.
NITIN NOHRIA: So that’s one form of experiential learning. But then, in my time as dean, we asked every one of our students to travel abroad, to get involved in real company situations. I think the only way to test whether the ideas that you’re learning play out in practice — how you apply your judgment — is through experiential learning. And I believe that in an age of AI, where the knowledge you have available will be at your fingertips, learning how to apply it in practical, experiential contexts will be the one profoundly powerful way of cultivating the kind of critical thinking and judgment I started our conversation with.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: You know, I was speaking with Bob Michele — he’s the head of fixed income at J.P. Morgan — and he has this quote that he tells his interns: the way to differentiate yourself is mastering AI tools the way my generation had to master the spreadsheet. Good advice?
NITIN NOHRIA: Very good advice.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Alright, our last two questions — and because you were dean at the Harvard Business School, these are going to be a little tailored to that. What is the prestige trap? What is the issue with chasing brand-name employers? Is that a sound strategy?
NITIN NOHRIA: Brands are brands because they reflect something real. I don’t think brands can sustain themselves if they don’t reflect real opportunities. So if you go to Goldman Sachs, there is something that you will learn at Goldman Sachs that’s important. Or if you go to JPMorgan Chase in banking. If you go to consulting firms like BCG, Bain & Company, McKinsey — these are brands that carry cachet because they’re important. If you are interested in media, you go to Bloomberg or Disney. These are good places to go because the brands carry something.
NITIN NOHRIA: But I think increasingly, I find at Harvard Business School that many of our students have learned that there’s a lot to be learned in places that are not brands. So the courage that people now have to start in places that aren’t already established brands has dramatically increased. And the reason that increases, I think, is that these people have come of age where great companies have been built in front of their eyes. Who knew what Facebook was going to be? Who knew what Google was going to be? In the span of 10, 15 years, extraordinary brands have been built. And so I think our students have become much more comfortable saying that while a brand provides some assurance of a good learning experience, I can also get a great learning experience if I put myself in a setting where there’s a lot more risk — but if it succeeds, it can succeed in an extraordinary way.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: And the question I’m very curious about: you’ve not only taught decades of students at Harvard, at the business school and elsewhere as well. I’m curious — what career paths of alumni from the Harvard Business School really surprised you?
NITIN NOHRIA: I think the thing that has constantly surprised me is when our students decide to stake out their own entrepreneurial journey. Fifty percent of our business school students, by the end of their careers, will have chosen an entrepreneurial path. And it can be anything from opening their own small consulting firm, to at some point deciding to start their own investment shop, to buying a small company, or even sometimes returning to their family company and deciding, “I want to run this company.”
NITIN NOHRIA: So it’s interesting. In the end, people want to have the opportunity to feel like, “I am reporting to no boss. I have ownership over what I’m building.” And yet some people will do it as soon as they graduate from the school; some people will do it 25 years later. What has constantly surprised me is: what’s the trigger that finally causes someone to say, “Okay, I now need to have the opportunity to be an entrepreneur”? And it’s amazing the different ways in which people arrive at that decision.
BARRY RITHOLTZ: Really fascinating stuff. Thank you for being so generous with your time, Professor Nohria. We have been speaking with Nitin Nohria, author of the new book The CEO: The Role, the Reality, and the Responsibility, and former dean of the Harvard Business School. You’ve been listening to Bloomberg’s At The Money.
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