Just The Fax: MIT’s Sam Ransbotham on The Real AI Evolution

In this episode, host Fred Davis sits down with Sam Ransbotham, Professor of Analytics at Boston College and AI Editor for MIT Sloan Management Review.

We strip away the hoopla and doom-and-gloom to get to the "brass tacks" reality of how this technology works in the wild and academia. From the classroom to the boardroom, Sam explains why we are focusing on the wrong risks—and why the biggest danger isn't that AI will replace us, but that we'll use it to automate our own bad habits.

Key Topics:

• The Calculator Analogy: Why banning ChatGPT in schools is exactly like banning calculators in math class (and why we need to get over it).

• The "Fax Machine" Trap: How companies are spending millions to use AI to read bad data, instead of just fixing the process.

• The "Sycophant" Effect: Why AI models are programmed to be "people pleasers," and why that makes them dangerous "Yes Men" in business.

• Magic vs. Math: Why understanding the limitations of these models is the only way to actually get value from them.