Moving Smart and Breaking Less at the Responsible AI in Global Business Conference

AI has made itself impossible to ignore. It dominates headlines, conference agendas, boardroom discussions, job interviews, and MBA classrooms. Yet as enthusiasm for the technology has grown, so too have public concerns about its impact. Polling in 2023 from Pew Research found that over 52% of Americans report feeling more concerned than excited about AI’s trajectory.

As student leaders of the Yale Responsible AI in Global Business Conference, we wanted to create a space for a different kind of conversation than what we typically see at AI and tech conferences. Reflecting Yale SOM's mission to educate leaders for business and society, our theme—“Move Smart, Break Less,” a play on the Facebook motto “Move fast and break things”—pushed participants to move beyond what AI can do and focus on how to deploy it responsibly.

Building on the foundation laid by last year’s three student leaders, we grew into a team of 20 people with roles in content, marketing, partnerships, operations, and finance. Drawing over 300 registrants, the daylong event at Evans Hall included panels covering consumer protection, capital efficiency, physical AI, and workforce automation. We cultivated partnerships across Yale's ecosystem and made new connections with local organizations.

Seeing this conference come to life was a highlight of our year. It was also an opportunity to demonstrate our genuine interest in AI, regardless of technical background, at a pivotal moment in our careers. Kristen began SOM with a marketing background, but through the conference was able to lead efforts and promote an event larger than anything she had worked on before. Pingshan, a key member of the content team, built programming and connected with leading figures in AI safety, a topic she deeply cares about. For Gigi, the head of the conference, it was an invaluable opportunity to build and lead a large team of high-performing leaders. From managing budgets to Costco runs for snacks for hundreds of people, our student team showed up fully for our community.

A theme that surfaced across multiple panels was the need for greater collaboration among industry, government, and academia. As AI advances, many of the challenges it creates cannot be addressed by any single sector alone. When addressing policies to mitigate job loss on the workforce panel, Jeff Schwartz, a professor at Columbia Business School and advisor to the AI-based human resources company Gloat, argued that society needs a “transition net, not a safety net”—in other words, coordinated action among employers, governments, and educational institutions to provide support for workers navigating AI-driven career transitions. During the consumer protection panel, Ziad Reslan from OpenAI emphasized that AI safety is only as strong as its weakest link and called for greater collaboration among technology companies to share safety tools and best practices, rather than treating them solely as competitive advantages.

When developing our panels, we deliberately assembled experts to mirror the ecosystem of actors who must collaborate to solve any AI challenge. In our consumer protection panel, we convened a model safety researcher, product safety practitioners from Google and OpenAI, and an independent academic critic. When Alice Marwick of Data & Society, an independent think tank advising on AI policy, raised a concern about lack of access to data to study AI’s impact, the practitioners called out a competing constraint, noting that even anonymized user data risks exposing private information. This specific exchange shed light on the nuanced approach one must take to balance transparency and privacy, which was only possible with different perspectives in the same room.

The capital efficiency panel featured the same kind of intellectual diversity. As MBA students, we felt compelled to ask: are these massive capital investments actually justified, or are we in an AI bubble? By bringing together a venture infrastructure investor, tech entrepreneurs, and a U.S. congressman, we examined that question from every angle of the ecosystem. Through his investments in AI, Jason Lau of the leading crypto trading platform OKX, had already seen a 50% efficiency gain in fraud detection workflows in his company; understandably, he argued more investment is clearly justified. Meanwhile, the congressman drew parallels between AI and historical innovations that have made good on large initial investments, such as railroads and fiber optics.

With this multi-stakeholder perspective came a throughline we did not fully anticipate: measured optimism. Throughout the day, panelists expressed a broad consensus that AI safety and regulation is genuinely hard. When asked what kept her up at night, Marwick pointed to the effects of cognitive overload on children, while acknowledging the promise of AI tools for tasks like vibe coding. Dave Bledin from Google perhaps captured the mood of the day most succinctly by noting, “We are living in the gray.”

That willingness to sit in the gray, clear-eyed about the risks while remaining open to the possibilities, defined the conference. Even among those who had thought most carefully about AI’s implications, there was wide agreement that its capabilities are real, growing, and still in their earliest stages. Responsibility, it turns out, is not defined by skepticism, but by the depth with which someone considers the full picture—asking the hard questions of who bears the costs, who is left out, and what we are not yet thinking about.

We are grateful to the Office of the Provost, Tsai CITY, the Yale Chief Executive Leadership Institute, and the Graduate and Professional Student Senate, without whom none of this would have been possible.