Enlightening panel discussion on the Generative AI ecosystem with Wharton Professor Kartik Hosanagar, Aparna Chennapragada, Chief Product Officer at Microsoft, Xing Liu, Senior Partner at HSG, Sajjad Jaffer, Founding Partner at GrowthCurve Capital and Lin Yuan, Chief AI Officer at Newfront last week at the 57th Wharton Global Forum. #WhartonFund
It was a great joy connecting with many former students and Wharton alumni at the Wharton global forum. Among many highlights, I moderated a panel with a stellar group of people. Some highlights from that discussion: 1. Aparna Chennapragada: Be model-first when building products: Every few months, the model is eating the product. Think "Thin product, Thick model" and build continuous feedback loop between the two." 2. Sajjad Jaffer: Data is a latent off-balance-sheet item. At the center of an AI strategy is the data strategy. 3. Xing Liu: Agentic AI will lead to tiny but very successful organizations. We will have to rethink everything we teach/learn at business school about organizational behavior, leadership, people management. 4. Lin Yuan: There are many practical advantages of vertical-specific, specialized AI models over generalized models (or of fine-tuning smaller models to domain-specific data). Cost of inference being the obvious one. 5. Ramon Richards: Modern architecture/infrastructure, quality data sets, automated delivery practices and rapid innovation mechanisms are important preconditions to react to this rapidly evolving space. Many more themes emerged that I will hopefully cover in the coming days. Congrats to the organizing team, Dean Erika H. James and forum chair Jacqueline Reses on a successful event.
This is great! Hope all is well Ramon Richards.
This couldn’t be more timely. As enterprise leaders navigate governance and transparency in Generative AI, conversations like these bring essential clarity. Appreciate the insights from this panel.
💯 Excellent!
This sounds like it was a top-tier discussion with a great mix of strategic insight and practical grounding. I really liked Aparna Chennapragada’s framing around "thin product, thick model." It's such a clear way to show the evolving balance between engineering and AI-driven iteration. Sajjad Jaffer’s take on data as a latent off-balance-sheet asset is also spot on. Too many organizations still underinvest in foundational data strategy. I'm curious to hear more from the group on how these ideas are being put into practice. Thanks for sharing, Ramon Richards. I'm bookmarking this thread.
Great panel and conversation!! Thanks for leading.
Love to see this!
Love this, Ramon
Good stuff!
Sajjad Jaffer & Ramon Richards -- NICE!