"The only cure for anxiety is experience." Vrunda Shah (’23SPS) said this to a room full of students, alumni, and young professionals at Columbia School of Professional Studies' recent Frame Your Future event, “Tech-Driven, Human-Centered: Leading Through Disruption.” Her words landed because everyone in the room was carrying some version of the same question: in a world being reshaped by AI, what makes a career durable?
The evening, hosted by Deloitte at its New York offices, brought together leaders from technology, consulting, and financial services, along with practitioners from Mastercard, IBM, and Deloitte. The panel also featured Technology Management Program faculty and recent M.S. in Technology Management graduates Tirtha Deepak Bandi, a product manager at J.P. Morgan, and Shah, a senior product manager at Google.
While not always reassuring, it was a clear-eyed account of what AI is actually changing and what it demands of people navigating that change.
The disruption is real, but the story is complicated.
Laura Kudia (’21SPS), vice president at Mastercard and a graduate of and faculty member in the Technology Management program, argued that AI has become a convenient explanation for restructuring that was likely to happen regardless. "A lot of companies post-pandemic hired very quickly, or perhaps their P&Ls are off, and they're using it as a scapegoat," she said. The data bears that out, at least for now: Bloomberg Economics, she noted, has found that AI-driven job loss "is not pulling through in the labor market" because enterprise-wide adoption is still in early stages. That doesn't mean the picture is rosy. "What we're certain of is two things," she said: "the GDP is in fact slowing down, and there are cracks in the labor market." Cause for concern, but not panic.
The bigger shift is structural.
Francesca Rossi, IBM fellow and global leader in Responsible AI, described how AI is compressing the traditional career arc. "The time that it used to take to go from a junior position to a senior one is now compressed," she said, "because you have at your disposal something that gives you all that expertise or knowledge or domain knowledge that otherwise you would have to spend a lot of time building." At the same time, she pointed to a second shift: "With the latest AI technologies, the use of natural language to interact with these systems is really making a difference. It really enables everybody, not just people who know how to code." The moat that once protected specialist roles has narrowed for everyone.
A distinguishing characteristic among people now is if they know what to ask the tools, and what to do with the information it provides. "Judgment is becoming the scarce and valuable thing," says Sherif Sakr, chief operating officer for New Ventures Technology and Innovation at Deloitte. That requires shifting, he argued, from "consensus to conviction: moving faster, killing things that aren't working, and resisting the sunk-cost thinking that slows most large organizations down."
The panel also urged job seekers to reframe the question. Instead of asking what job title you want, ask what problems you can solve. "If you strip away the job titles, if you strip away industries, and you open up to what are the problems that most urgently need to be solved and what am I good at solving," said Kudia, "that opens your windows up to a plethora of opportunities."
Vrunda Shah's own career illustrates the principle. She had applied to Google multiple times without getting an interview. The Columbia degree changed that — but less because of the credential than what earning it forced her to do. She consistently said yes to roles outside her expertise and treated every SPS course as a laboratory for real problems she was navigating at work. Building real judgment under real pressure. "Without experience, no one's going to trust your judgment," she said.
The panel's resounding conclusion: learning cannot be a one-time phase. “The machine is not taking over; that's my fundamental belief,” said Sakr. “But there will be a different way of dancing between the human and the AI.”
AI is not simply eliminating jobs. But it is changing the priorities. The skills AI can't replicate — judgment, curiosity, the willingness to be wrong in pursuit of something better — are the ones that were always worth building. This moment and this job market demand them more than ever. As Vrunda Shah put it, "Your point of view is what people are hiring you for."
About the Program
The Master of Science in Technology Management at Columbia University prepares graduates to lead digital transformation, and align technology and business strategy with an ethical lens. Through experiential learning, industry partnerships, and Columbia-supported research, students gain fluency in digital platforms and emerging technologies, and learn to design human-centered solutions that drive innovation and sustainable impact.
The program is available for part-time or full-time enrollment online or on campus in NYC. Learn more about the program here.
