Beyond ChatGPT: Finding the ‘Soul of Business’ at Darden

Jared D. Harris realized early he wasn’t built to be a “lock, stock and barrel accountant” — despite earning two accounting degrees and qualifying as a CPA.

“Ultimately, it was not for me,” he says.

The turning point came when he joined Vecna Technologies, a startup, as the director of finance and a member of the leadership team. There, the work shifted from balancing books to asking bigger questions.

“I fell in love with the questions I now understand to be questions that involve strategy,” Harris said on a recent episode of Office Hours, a Darden faculty spotlight series. “The accounting and the finance focus wasn’t as interesting to me as the larger questions around competitive strategy. How do we position relative to competitors? What is it we want to do and not do?”

That curiosity pulled him toward academia. But committing to a Ph.D. felt like a leap, especially in a field he wasn’t sure he loved enough to study for four years.

Then a conversation changed everything.

Someone close to him posed a simple question: When you think back on your previous academic work, including your master’s program, which class did you find the most compelling? Maybe that’s what you should study.

“The answer was easy,” Harris recalls. “It was my business ethics class. But I thought, you can’t get a Ph.D. in that.”

A moment later, the idea clicked.

“Then I thought — wait a second. Can you?”

Turns out, you can.

And so he did.

Today, Harris is the Samuel L. Slover Research Chair and Associate Professor of Business Administration at the University of Virginia Darden School of Business, where he teaches courses on strategy, business ethics and corporate governance.

That blend of strategy and ethics now shapes how he approaches one of business education’s most pressing pedagogical questions: how to teach in the age of artificial intelligence.

When Strategy Meets AI

Harris is the course head for the Strategy core curriculum. This year, he tried something unusual: fully embracing AI in the classroom.

“I felt that if you're one of the top business schools in the world, it's crucial that the curriculum be robust to what is actually happening in the world, and the widespread adoption of large language models and generative AI is a huge thing,” he says.

On the first day of the core Strategy course this academic year, he told students they were free to use tools such as ChatGPT, Claude or Copilot however they chose, including for research, assignments and exams.

The students were also required to use a new “AI discussion agent” called CAiSEY (Classroom Artificial Intelligence Studio for Engaging You) to meet a small percentage of course requirements.

CAiSEY is configured to have realistic, voice-based conversations with students about the course material, including interactions that Harris describes as “polite but adversarial,” meaning it is designed to challenge assumptions and analysis voiced by the student. (For more, see the article “UVA Darden Goes ‘All-In’ on Use of Generative AI in Core Strategy Course” and the video feature “AI Meets the Case Method at Darden: How Faculty and Students are All In.”)

“We want to prepare students to be able to lead in the actual world that we live in,” says Harris. “When students start their jobs at McKinsey, or Amazon, or Dupont, or on Wall Street, the company is going to say, ‘Here's our proprietary LLM, please use this to do your job better.’”

But there’s a tension at the center of that approach.

“Darden’s approach to student development and adult education embraces a participant-centered learning model that helps students develop their expertise and judgment, which remains the heart of what we do at the school. In other words, we want you to learn something at Darden besides just how to write a good ChatGPT prompt,” he says. “If that's all you learned in the program, we haven't done our job.”

At Darden, student-centered learning is key.

“The bulk of the course is still built around these Socratic discussions, and in those discussions, you don't have time to ask ChatGPT a question before you respond,” says Harris. “You have to unfold your thinking in front of your classmates and professor.”

That balance — using AI without relying on it — became clear in one unexpected classroom moment. After a quiz, Harris noticed many students had missed the same question. The reason: ChatGPT had confidently provided them the wrong answer.

“It sounded plausible, but it was dead wrong,” he says. The moment became a lesson in itself: AI can assist judgment, but it can’t replace it.

Businesses Confront AI

A new case Harris co-wrote this year with Darden colleague Professor Rory McDonald — for the required strategy course — examines the disruptive impact of generative AI on the world’s leading consulting firms.

Students were required to engage with AI tools throughout their preparation, and one class session focused specifically on the challenge AI poses to consulting.

With roughly 40% of Darden’s residential MBA students aiming for careers in consulting, the discussion was highly relevant to students hoping to prove their value in an industry likely to be substantially impacted by the growing capabilities of AI large language models.

A companion case from Harris and McDonald highlights a similar challenge posed by the advent of generative AI to the business model of internet search giant Google.

Both cases highlight crucial questions that dominant businesses — such as Google and McKinsey — face as they adjust their strategies to disruptive technological advances and the evolving business implications of AI.

What Should Rivian Do?

Another new case Harris wrote for this year’s required strategy course, co-written with Darden Professor Scott Snell and currently taught in draft form, focuses on electric-vehicle startup Rivian.

“Every case has a decision that's at the forefront of that case, and you have to make a decision,” Harris says, which is why each of these cases forces students to wrestle with real-world scenarios.

For example, if you're Rivian, what should you do to advance your objectives? It could be that the company is trying to become more profitable or trying to gain more market share. If it’s more market share, in which markets?

As Harris explains, the domestic market for EVs is subject to a high degree of regulatory and political uncertainty.

“I suspect that won't last, but the international markets are altogether different, because the Chinese manufacturers are big players in Europe and Australia and elsewhere,” he says.

So at Rivian, you're trying to figure out questions such as, should we pursue international expansion? And if so, where? Should I try to make a big play in the EU? On the other hand, how should we forecast domestic production and sales in the United States, given domestic regulatory volatility? How might gasoline price increases impact domestic EV demand? Should we get involved with more B2B activity and try to get more Amazon vans running Rivians?

“There are lots of ways to go here, and it’s difficult to predict the future, but the tools and frameworks from strategy are designed to help students think through potential second- and third-order effects and make some judgment calls about what Rivian ought to do,” Harris adds. “And if AI can help streamline your analytical process as you think through these questions, that’s terrific. But gaining facility with using AI to augment your judgment is the real key. AI can’t do everything.”

Why Harris Turns to Literature

Along those lines, one of the elective courses Harris teaches is “Business Ethics Through Literature.”

“Let's put it this way,” he says. “This is a very different course from the core strategy course.”

Students read novels and short stories, and analyze songs and poetry.

“It's a course that's based on fiction, and there's a reason I choose to approach it that way,” Harris says. “Literary fiction allows us to think about big questions involving values and ethics, and it does so in a very different way than a case-based business ethics course.”

For Harris, that difference is essential. “Business is at its core a human activity,” he says, one shaped by choices, priorities and values.

Literature, he adds, helps us touch on what he describes as “the soul of business.”

“Business is just a human activity with a bunch of us interacting together,” he says. “Engaging with literature is increasingly something humans are doing less and less of, so it can be helpful to have a course that says, ‘Okay, here's a reading list. We're going to read. We're going to discuss. We're going to ask the deep questions.’ In some ways, it's an antidote to being on a screen all the time — to get your head back in a book and then get a bunch of smart people in the room and say, ‘Man, this really challenged me.’”

Unlike in the core Strategy class, Harris actively dissuades students from using generative AI in the literature-based course.

“The course is designed to facilitate slow-burn insights from sustained attention,” he says. “When I ask them to read a 500-page novel, that's a big ask, but there are certain things that we can learn from that mode of instruction that you can't gain as effectively from a fast-paced case-method discussion.”

It’s also intentionally analog. In a world of constant screens, the course asks students to slow down — to read deeply, reflect and engage in conversation with others.

The Motivation for Slowing Down

The temptation is obvious: let AI think for you. It’s fast, increasingly reliable and, at a glance, “correct enough,” often enough, to feel indispensable.

But that convenience comes with a cost.

“The cheap and easy way to use AI is to outsource your thinking,” he says. “And a lot of people are going to do that.”

The problem isn’t that AI is wrong, it’s that it short-circuits the kind of sustained intellectual struggle that builds real judgment. Even if a tool gets you to a solid answer 70% of the time, Harris argues, it robs you of something more valuable: the habit of wrestling with hard questions, sitting with ambiguity and working through competing ideas over time.

“Engaging with fiction allows you to touch on values in what may be the deepest way possible, short of learning from our own lived experiences,” he says.

Harris compares it to the lingering impact of a powerful song or film — something that stays with you because it touches on something deeper.

“Get your head back in a book,” he says. “Then get a bunch of smart people together and say, ‘This challenged me.’ And listen to how others react.”

Professor Jared D. Harris is co-author of the cases, “Expertise Disrupted: Consulting Confronts Generative AI” and “Seek and Destroy: AI’s Challenge to Google’s Business Model,” with Rory McDonald and Amy Klopfenstein, published by Darden Business Publishing (2025 and 2026). Harris also co-authored a forthcoming case, “Rivian: Finding Its Lane,” with Scott Snell and Trent Chinnaswamy.

To hear the full conversation with Harris, and explore past episodes, visit “Office Hours,” Presented by Darden Ideas to Action