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.