For almost a year now, I’ve been unpacking the story of Harvard’s decision to remove the tenure of HBS professor Francesca Gino in a podcast. It’s taken a long time because I’m slow, because crafting the story carefully is hard, and because crafting the story carefully is important. At the beginning of this month, I posted the final episode, a closing argument of sorts, summarizing the previous 8.
I then wondered what would happen if we took the transcripts from those episodes and fed them into an AI and had the AI produce its own summary or artifacts to help understand the case.
I began with NotebookLM and asked it to produce a podcast based on the summaries. I was blown away by its output. Far better than I, it had pulled together the arguments in the case and presented them in a much more compelling and persuasive way than I had, either in the individual episodes themselves or in the summary closing argument.
I then experimented with some of the video artifacts, and they too were compelling, if in places weird. All this led me to determine to make these AI artifacts available as a simpler way to onboard people to understanding the facts behind the case.
On the web page for the case, we therefore now have an AI artifacts page:
- The page begins with a 50-word summary.
