In the Age of AI, the Best Thing I Can Give My Students Is a Dinner Table

Commentary

Last night my dining room held 23 students from two graduate business cohorts and five accomplished business leaders who had no obligation to be there. These seasoned entrepreneurs and chief executives came anyway. They stayed for hours, well past the point of polite mentorship, trading questions with my students about hiring, raising capital, and what it really takes to lead. Before the executives left, they asked to stay in touch and to keep helping these students build their careers, including potentially their own firms.

Here is the detail that should give every educator pause: I teach only online.

We are told that online education is the impersonal kind, the transactional kind, the screen-bound future that strips the humanity out of a classroom. So it is worth saying plainly that the format assumed to be the most distant produced an evening of genuine connection. It did not happen by accident, and it did not happen because of the technology. It happened because someone set a table and people chose to sit at it.

That choice is becoming the whole game.

Artificial intelligence is going to be very good at a great many things universities used to monopolize. It can already explain a discounted cash flow analysis more patiently than most professors, draft a passable marketing plan in seconds, and tutor a struggling student at 2 a.m. without losing its temper.

But there is a hard limit to what a model can do, and the limit is exactly the thing my students needed last night. An algorithm can answer your question. It cannot vouch for you to someone who is hiring. It cannot pull you aside and tell you the thing about your business plan that no one writes down. It cannot open a door, because it does not own any doors. As more of education, advice, and even conversation becomes machine-mediated, the rare and decisive resource is no longer information. It is a human being who has chosen to be in your corner.

Careers still move at the speed of trust, and trust is still built across a table.

This puts a responsibility on universities that too many of them are about to get wrong. The temptation, in an AI era, will be to compete with the machines on their own ground, to automate more, to scale more, and to turn the university into a faster vending machine for content. The scarce thing is not content; we are drowning in content. The scarce thing is proximity, and proximity has to be built on purpose. That is why I invite every cohort I teach into my home for dinner. Not because it is in a job description, but because the relationships that change a career do not form in a learning-management system. They form when a successful founder lingers over dessert because a student asked a question worth answering. Universities should stop trying to out-compute the computers, and start creating the encounters that no computer can supply.

But here is the half of the argument that students need to hear, and that we do them no favors by softening. The opportunities I described will not be delivered to you. They have to be built, and a good deal of the building is yours to do.

No algorithm is going to introduce you to the person who changes your trajectory. No professor, however devoted, can want it for you. The most dangerous habit AI could teach a generation is the assumption that everything worth having can be summoned on demand, instantly and without friction, including other people’s regard. Mentorship does not work that way. A network does not work that way. You earn them by showing up, by asking the question after the question, and by being the kind of person an accomplished stranger decides to spend an evening helping. Those are not soft skills. In an automated economy, they may be the only durable skills left.

My students did not get advice last night. They got relationships, and relationships are something you cannot download.

That is the future of higher education in the age of artificial intelligence, and it is older than the internet. The machines will handle the answers. Someone still has to set the table. And someone has to choose to sit at it.

Views expressed in this article are the opinions of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.