We Meet Change with Curiosity

AI in the Workplace: More Efficiency, More Work

When Benjamin Sovocool ’21 began using AI in his legal practice, he expected efficiency gains. What he didn’t expect was a heavier workload. “I use AI constantly, but I have not become any less busy — if anything, I am busier than ever,” said Sovocool, a lawyer based in New York. “There is so much work that previously was too time-consuming and expensive to really get done. The demand for legal services is nowhere close to being fulfilled.” 

Sovocool graduated with a double major in economics and philosophy before earning his law degree at Cornell Law School. When he thinks about how AI has influenced his professional life, he shares a recent project where AI transformed work that used to require weeks of manual document review.

His client, a pharmaceutical company, wanted to know what market trends and standard terms looked like in public merger agreements. Historically, that meant reading through multi-page documents, extracting relevant clauses, and compiling spreadsheets. Now, thanks to AI, he can pull filed agreements and extract relevant language in hours.

“Obviously, you still have to review it to ensure accuracy as it isn’t always 100 percentcorrect,” he said. “But when you can do it that much faster, clients don’t just say, ‘I’m glad we did that quickly.’ They say, ‘Since you did that so easily, can you look at this data too?’ There is an endless list of additional work.”

Sovocool credits his liberal arts education — particularly philosophy courses — with preparing him for this new way of working. “The value of having surface-level knowledge of an issue is now basically zero,” he said. “Real expertise is the new currency. Research by Anthropic shows that the quality of AI results relies primarily on how well the user understands the topic, rather than just the AI tool itself.” This is why Puget Sound’s mission to provide a space where students can develop that deep expertise is so vital to today’s workforce. His advice for new graduates navigating AI in any field is to really consider what they want to be doing in the future. “Take a beat to think more critically about what you want and what you want to achieve,” he said. “Simply doing tasks faster is not necessarily conducive to human flourishing — we have to direct our actions toward good ends.”

Professional Advice on Rethinking AI in the Workplace

In his role leading the product and engineering teams behind Microsoft’s AI business tools, Ryan Cunningham ’05 has had a front-row seat as companies across every industry attempt to integrate artificial intelligence into their operations. Through these conversations, he has observed a consistent pattern among those who struggle to see results. He said they prioritize the technology itself over the specific problems they are trying to solve. 

Cunningham serves as corporate vice president for Copilot Studio and Power Platform at Microsoft. That vantage point puts him in regular conversation with leaders across industries, and he said the pattern is consistent. Companies feel pressure to be seen “doing something with AI” and end up bolting a chatbot onto an existing process rather than asking what a genuinely better version of that process would look like. 

Sometimes, reaching goals means rethinking processes from the ground up. Cunningham said to see real benefits, organizations must be willing to completely rethink and shred their core operating methods to change how they function day to day. This willingness to look past legacy habits is exactly why he sees an unexpected advantage for newcomers entering the workforce. “As much as it is a disadvantage to not have 15 or 30 years of experience in a field, it is also a huge advantage to not be bound by the understanding of how it was always done before,” he said.

For alumni deeper into their careers, some of whom are anxious about the pace of change, Cunningham’s message is more optimistic than cautionary. He argues AI is shifting leverage away from software engineers alone and toward people who deeply understand their own field — finance, education, nonprofit work, journalism — because it’s now far easier to put powerful tools directly into the hands of people who already know what better looks like in their world. It’s a
perspective shaped by his own background as an international political economy major. 

Cunningham said the underlying dynamic is familiar compared to previous technological shifts he has experienced, such as the early internet, cloud computing, and the rise of social media, even if this shift is faster and more capital-intensive than the previous ones. “Every platform shift creates winners and losers,” he said, “and the people who navigate it best tend to be the ones who stay curious and get in early, rather than waiting for the rules to be fully written.”

How Puget Sound is Navigating AI on Campus

Walk across campus on any given day, and chances are nearly half the people you pass have recently used artificial intelligence — whether they will admit it or not. 

The data from a 2025 campus survey by the university’s AI working group is an important starting point. The survey, which received 521 responses, helped shape the group’s policy recommendations and strategic priorities. What it could not settle was the more nuanced question of how to tell when a given use of AI actually served the university’s mission, and when it didn’t. 

This challenge has been at the forefront of efforts co-led by Associate Provost and Professor of Anthropology Gareth Barkin and former university chief information officer Francisco Chavez. The group collaborated to create an ethical framework inspired by the university’s Institutional Review Board process — the same rigorous method used to evaluate research and projects involving human subjects at Puget Sound. This framework now guides decisions about when and whether to adopt generative AI tools on campus.

The working group’s other outcomes include a resource site for students, staff, and faculty as well as recommendations for supporting the development of critical AI literacy across campus. But the heart of the effort is a set of seven ethical principles that ground every decision in the university’s mission, rather than in the technology itself. Barkin frames the university’s goal as greater understanding, not AI adoption. “We want people asking where and whether these tools genuinely serve our goals as an institution of higher learning,” he said, “and we must demonstrate a willingness to set them aside where they don’t.” 

Barkin sees the university’s liberal arts ethos positioning Puget Sound to manage AI intentionally. Small class sizes and close relationships between faculty and students make room for critical thinking to be taught alongside disciplinary knowledge. “Our size lets us do this work relationally, through thoughtful conversations between faculty and students,” he said. “That’s how our students graduate with the contextual awareness and creative instincts that are indispensable in an AI-saturated world.”

Barkin returns to the same principles to answer a common question from alumni: how to keep AI from reinforcing bias in their own organizations. “These systems learn from historical data, and that data carries the inequities we’re still working to address,” he said. “On its own, AI tends to reproduce those patterns. Grounding decisions in mission-based principles allows us to push back against them.”