When Scott Anthony (Dartmouth College, class of 1996) left a 20-year career in high-stakes consulting to join the faculty at his alma mater in July 2022, he thought he was leaving the “intense day-to-day combat” of the corporate world for a quieter life of teaching. Instead (as Anthony previously described in a commentary for Fortune), he arrived on campus just months before the release of ChatGPT, landing him squarely in the center of the artificial intelligence (AI) revolution that has left many of his students paralyzed by anxiety.
In a recent interview, the former consultant at McKinsey and Innosight, a boutique firm cofounded by Clayton Christensen and Mark Johnson in 2000 and acquired by Huron in 2017, revealed the prevailing mood among the next generation of business leaders isn’t just excitement—it is fear.
“One of the things that really surprises me consistently is how scared our students are of using it,” Anthony said. He clarified this anxiety isn’t merely about academic integrity or cheating. Plenty of his students are excited to use AI and push into the frontier of this new tech advance, he clarified, but a meaningful portion approach it with “hesitation and fear.” They are “scared full stop.”
