Ideagen Radio
Ideagen Radio
Siya Raj Purohit on AI's Transformative Role in Education and Leadership
Discover how AI is revolutionizing education with insights from Siya Raj Purohit, the visionary leading OpenAI's Education Go-To-Market strategy. Learn how AI tools like ChatGPT are breaking new ground in personalized learning, shifting from initial skepticism to being embraced by innovative educators such as Ethan Mollick. We unravel the evolution of assignments and curricula, empowering both students and educators to unlock AI's potential for enhanced learning outcomes. Ethical considerations and privacy concerns are on the agenda, too, as we underscore OpenAI's commitment to making artificial intelligence both safe and accessible.
But the conversation doesn't stop at education. We venture into the broader potential of technology to transform professional careers and leadership roles. Whether you're looking to boost productivity or enhance critical thinking skills, AI offers tools that don't require expert-level knowledge to make a significant impact. We'll explore how AI is not just about replacing tasks but enhancing human capabilities, allowing for a more fulfilling and effective professional journey. Join us in this forward-looking exploration to understand how AI can be a game-changer in both learning and leadership.
#openai #ideagen #gls2025
View Siya's LinkedIn here: https://www.linkedin.com/in/siyarajpurohit/
Learn more about OpenAi Education here: https://openai.com/chatgpt/education/
View the entire 2025 Global Leadership Summit here: https://www.ideagenglobal.com/2025globalleadershipsummit
Welcome to IdeaGen TV live from Washington DC. Today I am honored privileged to have with me Sia Raj Parohit. Education Go-To-Market from OpenAI Welcome Sia. Thanks soit. Education Go-To-Market from OpenAI Welcome Sia.
Speaker 2:Thanks so much for having me Really excited to share what OpenAI is doing in education.
Speaker 1:Well, you know, we're all hearing about OpenAI, we're hearing about AI in general. There's a lot of misconceptions. Perhaps You're in education, which is really an exciting arena for AI. Obviously You're in education, which is really an exciting arena for AI, obviously. And so I'd like to ask you for our global audience, give us a little bit about your background so they know who you are and specifically what your role is at OpenAI.
Speaker 2:Absolutely so. I've been working in education since I was 18. When I was in college, I was studying computer engineering, and now this is common knowledge. But a lot of universities don't teach STEM degrees in a way that's accessible to everyone, and I started seeing that as a student. A lot of my classmates started dropping out of the engineering programs people who would have become really good engineers, but they weren't able to learn in the way that engineering was being taught. So I did this research project where I called emails from really famous people to ask for their opinion on why someone should study engineering. This is 2010, 2011.
Speaker 2:So before the whole learn to code movement had taken off, before people knew how powerful STEM careers could be, and I turned my research into a book about America's job skills gap that I published in 19. So since then, I've been trying to solve that problem, trying to make these skills much more accessible for people so they can move into new socioeconomic classes. In my career, I've been early at two high growth ed tech companies, worked in venture capital, investing companies like Coursera and Course Hero, and then for the past three years, I was at Amazon doing education partnerships. I joined OpenAI about eight months ago to help build up our education vertical and my job is to think about the future of AI at universities and school districts. We're spending a lot of time imagining the future of these campuses and how AI plays in to help people learn skills better, to help them grow in their professional journeys. That's the work I do at OpenAI now.
Speaker 1:How much more exciting could that be? I'd love to follow up on that, which is incredibly exciting, to ask how this technology at OpenAI intersects with the needs, the broader needs, of the education sector. And then, what are the biggest opportunities you see for AI in transforming education across the spectrum?
Speaker 2:So ever since I started working in education as a sector, our goal was to achieve personalized learning. We always said that if we can provide a personalized tutor for every student, we have made it as a sector, because then it can adapt to the students' needs, help them grow in their careers and whatever skills they want to develop. And I think that with ChatGPT we have achieved it. Like I have a personalized tutor that I talk to. It knows my projects, it knows my aspirations, it knows my manager's personality and how I should correspond with them. Like it just helps me become a much better knowledge worker. And I'm really excited. Like our vision is to be able to provide this in the hands of all students and learners and teachers and educators around the world. And we're at the very beginning of that journey, but excited to kind of share what we've done so far there it's just awesome to be involved in anything that's transformative.
Speaker 1:I've heard this being akin to the industrial revolution or those moments in history where there's been so much transformation happening and, by the time you figure it out, it's already happened. So we're living through this transformation. I mean, every single one of us are using ChatGPT or whatever AI platform you prefer In my case it's ChatGPT, of course and I love it.
Speaker 1:I mean, it learns, it's helpful, it helps you get a start. If you're writing something and I can't even imagine you know that even schools now in education are trying to figure it out Do we ban it? Do we embrace it? Do we, you know? Do we sign an ethics code? I'm not using an AI platform for education, but the smart schools will embrace it, I think, and we'll say utilize it as a tool, because it's all about the prompts, right, it's about being able to utilize, like a dictionary or a thesaurus or whatever it may be, to help you get better, to accelerate.
Speaker 2:Is that right? So it's so interesting. Chatgpt came out two years ago and for the first year, a lot of schools, like you said, banned it because they were trying to figure out how to rethink curriculum and assignments and learning in the age of AI. But something changed about 10 or 11 months ago. My belief is that influencers like Ethan Mollick, who's a professor at Wharton, really helped destigmatize AI in education and started showing what the value could be in classes. And now we're getting closer to the main part of that adoption curve A lot more professors at universities, a lot more teachers in school districts starting to think about how to incorporate AI. And that's where it gets super exciting, because that means we're rethinking the assignments that we give our students, knowing that now they have access to the super intelligence that's outside of their brains. So now we need to almost make them like as great, like orchestrators, and be able to use AI to produce really good output, and that shift is just so exciting, I think.
Speaker 1:I think it's incredible to hear about superintelligence. I mean, we all think we're somewhat intelligent, but when you think about superintelligence, it takes it to the next level. Right, and so ethics, innovation. How do you balance these considerations when taking also into account the issue of privacy?
Speaker 2:Absolutely. So a couple of things to unpack here. The first is around, like, accessibility of this technology. One of OpenAI's core goals is to make the safe, artificial general intelligence accessible to everyone around the world. So one of the first things was to launch a free product. Many of you might have tried out the free product ChatGPT. It's actually really good, like. It provides a lot of the capabilities for free to any user on the world who has internet. And then, just to double down on that, just about a month ago we launched a 1-800 number for ChatGPT, so older adults in the US who are used to the 1-800 numbers and being able to call and talk are able to do that, which is like a really nice unlock for a new demographic.
Speaker 2:We also launched ChatGPT on WhatsApp, so now people in developing countries who may not have that much internet bandwidth but can still get on WhatsApp can chat with ChatGPT. So we're trying to solve for accessibility in these ways. I'm excited because I think that's going to unlock the next billion users in developing countries with these kind of platforms. And on the privacy side, we launched a product called ChatGPT EDU. This is designed for, like it's an enterprise grade security platform designed for school districts and universities. So now professors can upload their content, like the entire year's case materials, onto ChatGPT and we don't train, like our models, based on that information. It's secure. It lives only in their workspace. Only they and their admins have control of it. So it gives a lot more security and privacy to that content, which I'm excited about, because professors become much more comfortable with it and so taking that even a step further in terms of collaboration with educators and institutions.
Speaker 1:How do you ensure you've talked a little bit about this, but how do you ensure that OpenAI's models meet their needs specifically, so initially we were.
Speaker 2:Actually it's an interesting product because for most products you do like different types of user research. You develop the use cases, then you market those. In our case, we actually learned the use cases from the professors themselves. So over the past year we've seen a lot of interesting things happen.
Speaker 2:Some of the most likely ways that professors are using this and how we are now explaining to the next generation of professors how to think about it are one is around like information retrieval, so what professors call lecture recall. So one of the most common use cases is professors can upload their semester's. One of the most common use cases is professors can upload their semester's worth of content and students can ask questions to that content. So a business school professor at Harvard Business School uploaded all of his case studies and now students ask questions like did CEO handle layoff spell and get the exact examples to help them understand that concept.
Speaker 2:Or like I'm learning this esoteric statistics concept when will I ever use this in life? And you can get practical examples. So it's your ability to converse with the knowledge of the university in a much deeper way than ever before and that makes it super interesting for students. Most of the questions from students come between 12 am and 3 a am, which is also when a human ta is not available. So it's like been a great support system for students right, it's like a ta as well?
Speaker 1:yeah, absolutely so. See what inspired your initial interest in education and technology. You're marrying the two, which is so exciting.
Speaker 2:Like what inspired you to get involved in this so, as I mentioned at 18, it was a personal problem. I was was like is this a SIA problem? Is this a system problem? Thankfully I realized or felt it was a system problem that was preventing me from becoming a good engineer. And now I think the aspiration is how can we use technology to help anyone kind of get to those aspirations and not feel that the system is rigged against them because they don't learn in the way that classes used to teach content?
Speaker 1:Right, right, exactly. And so you also worked in venture capital and ed tech, and this all influenced your current approach at OpenAI. Tell us about that.
Speaker 2:So I worked as an investor at a fund called GSV Ventures. It's a billion dollar ed tech VC fund. And then I founded my own VC fund a couple of years ago with my friend, taylor Stockton. It's called Pathway Ventures. So with Pathway, we invest in early stage founders. It's pre-seed and seed future of learning and work and that's been really exciting because we're able to think a lot about economic mobility from different angles.
Speaker 2:Like initially we thought it was like an education game. I'm like OK, if you can teach online in different ways, it's going to solve the problems. Like okay, if you can teach online in different ways, it's going to solve the problems. But then you realize that you're fighting on so many different dimensions. Individuals who are hourly workers don't have the time to learn a lot of times and then after a busy day of work, they use Netflix instead of coming and learning on Coursera or Udacity. So these kind of elements we need to fight to be able to give people the opportunity to learn more effectively are the types of things we're trying to invest in now.
Speaker 1:And so examples. We've talked a lot about your background and your interests and your journey. What's an example of a successful project or partnership that you've spearheaded specifically at OpenAI?
Speaker 2:So at OpenAI we're working with a lot of universities ranging from, like the Ivy League, state schools, community colleges, school districts. I think some of the most interesting conversations we're having right now are with professors who are really rethinking their curriculum. There's a Wharton MBA professor named Stefano Pantoni who was talking to me about. He's like what is the value of an essay? And, just for context, for the 10 years he was teaching this class, an essay was always the final submission from his MBA students. So he's like what is the value of an essay? The value of an essay is not necessarily in its output, but in the conversational skills and the critical thinking skills that get to that output. So now he requires the students use ChatGPT. He's like they're going to use it anyway, might as well require it and instead he measures the number of prompts it takes a student to get to an essay that they're happy with. Some students are so good at prompt engineering that it takes like two or three prompts and they have a really good essay. And some students go back 19 or 20 times to get to an essay that they're happy with.
Speaker 2:So this is super interesting because this is a measure of your ability to clearly articulate what you're looking for as an output and that's going to become a really key skill because, again, the super intelligence exists. How can you orchestrate it and visualize really good output that you can get to with it? And so really excited about that shift. And I guess one other thing I'd add here is that, when I think forward to the skills that I would want the next generation, and like our children, to learn, it's two things. One is this ability to visualize that great output. So you have to read really good books, you have to be able to see really good content and understand what that extraordinary output can look like. And then the second is, like, the ability to inspire. So how can you use these tools to do some of the backend work and you become the charismatic and inspiring figure who can, like, rally a team or close a partnership and do all the human things that AI can't.
Speaker 1:That's really cool for the global audience to hear that there's still a role for human beings within the context of AI, and so it's all about. The prompt is what I'm hearing. Are you able to ask the right questions?
Speaker 2:The right questions yes. And AI systems will get smarter deducing what you're asking. So I don't think prompt engineering is a skill, but I do think that the ability to visualize the output, is To visualize the output that is.
Speaker 1:That's just, it's mind blowing Leadership. This is the Global Leadership Summit. How has your leadership and let's add the overlay of OpenAI on top of this evolved to where you are today?
Speaker 2:So interesting. I think that when I first became a manager or a leader in different companies, I used to think that a really good manager was the second best person on any team to do any job, and they were able to kind of step in, fill in like a co-worker completed project or has to go sick or something. I thought that they were supposed to be the back-end replacement and now I think, 10 years in, I think that a really good manager or leader is able to see things in an individual that they can't see in themselves, and that's also what makes a human manager much better than an AI manager in some ways, because an AI knows what you tell it about yourself. But a human manager, especially a really good one, can see things you don't articulate about yourself and help you double down on the things that make you extraordinary and help you hopefully become a much better version of yourself or a much higher thinking individual on who you can become.
Speaker 1:You know this has been such a profound interview. We could go on for days, days and days. I have many prompts that I could ask you, just like I do with OpenAI, but I'd like to say what is your call to action for our global audience here today from open AI.
Speaker 2:Yeah, one thing I just want to call out is a lot of people reach out to me being afraid that they're behind the AI curve. In some ways they're like there's so much happening, how do I stay up to date? And I just want to kind of reassure them. Not all of us have to become experts on the sector as a whole and don't feel the need to do that almost. You don't need to understand all the nuances of the technology. You need to understand how you can use the product to become a better knowledge worker, better at your profession, whatever that may be. And that's a much easier ask to take on, because in the future, I think your ability to use AI in your job will help you become more productive and hopefully, like I hear from a lot of people that they're much more fulfilled in their careers because they can use AI. So that's our like, that's the goal I think we should be striving for Not to all of us become like Ethan Mollick level of experts in AI.
Speaker 1:That's right. That's right. See you, raj Rohit, go to market for education at OpenAI, inspiring the world. Thank you so very much. Thanks so much.