Deep Dive into Artificial Intelligence: Insights from Prof. Rahul De’
We had the privilege of hosting Prof. Rahul De', Founder and CEO of Memoric AI LLP and Retired Professor, Indian Institute of Management Bangalore, for a deeply reflective and forward-looking two-day (26–27 February) session on Artificial Intelligence.
While the sessions covered the technical foundations of Generative AI, including transformer architectures, self-attention, fine-tuning, RLHF, RAG, and the evolving spectrum from ANI to AGI, the real depth lay elsewhere. The conversation quickly moved beyond how AI works to how AI is reshaping scholarship, management education, and critical thinking itself.
Several powerful questions emerged from discussions among IIMV faculty and PhD scholars:
▪ Should we begin re-examining the very philosophy of critical thinking?
▪ Should management education focus more strongly on conceptual instillation across domains such as Marketing, Information Systems, and Organizational Behaviour rather than over-indexing on AI usage?
▪ Do students now require basic coding literacy?
▪ Is prompting a skill that must be formally taught?
▪ Should every institution articulate a clear AI policy?
What made the sessions particularly engaging was the emphasis on hands-on experimentation across tools. Participants compared outputs from ChatGPT, NotebookLM, Claude, Humata AI, Research Rabbit and others, decoding similarities and differences in responses, structure, hallucination patterns, and analytical depth. Two clear takeaways emerged: different tools produce different epistemic textures, and efficiency depends not only on the tool but also on the quality of prompting.
A Python-based simulation of the classic Beer Game, built using GPT-generated code, was also run to demystify supply-chain dynamics. The exercise demonstrated how AI-assisted coding can accelerate pedagogical experimentation while still requiring human verification and interpretation.
One particularly resonant idea was the call to cultivate “Skeptical Intelligence.”
Not AI avoidance.
Not blind adoption.
But disciplined curiosity, intellectual humility, evidence-seeking, and counterfactual thinking that engages critically with AI outputs. Grateful to Prof. Rahul De’ for the rigor, candor, humor, and the questions that will stay with us well beyond these two days.
