Bill Rand, the McLauchlan Distinguished Professor of Marketing and Analytics at the Poole College of Management and the Goodnight Executive Director of the Institute for Advanced Analytics (IAA), was interviewed by IAA student Jarrel Horton. Rand spoke about how he came to lead the IAA, outlined the rapid changes in AI and what his life looks like outside of NC State.

When asked about his professional background, he says that his undergraduate degree is in computer science but, “When I went to grad school in AI, I realized that I wasn’t really interested in improving algorithms or focusing on precision/recall metrics. I was more interested in whether these tools could help solve problems that hadn’t been solved.” 

He was encouraged to apply his expertise to business schools, “and eventually I ended up teaching in marketing, where I was doing analytics and data science before those terms were widely used.” He spent around two decades in that field. “So when my dean asked if I’d be interested in taking on the directorship here, it felt like a natural fit. Given my background in AI and applied analytics, it seemed like a place where I could help take the program to the next level.”

Rand heavily emphasizes the importance of using AI as a teammate and a collaborator, but he stresses that interpersonal and social-emotional skills will be more important than ever.

“AI isn’t good at understanding how humans relate to each other. A data scientist needs to think about how their work will be perceived … say, a pricing policy that might affect different customer groups. How will customers talk to each other about it? How will it be received? Thinking about the human side is going to be really important.”

You can read the full interview on Data Column, the IAA’s student blog.