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There are two reasons that gas prices could linger on the higher end, said Christopher Knittel, associate dean for climate and sustainability. One is the large amount of infrastructure in the Middle East that has been damaged or destroyed. The second is the uncertainty about whether sailing through the Strait of Hormuz is safe. "Basic economics tells us the riskier business is, the higher profits you have to earn to want to enter into that business," Knittel said. "Oil, gasoline, and natural gas have gotten more risky. That might actually keep us from ever getting back to prewar levels for gasoline," he added.

Visiting senior lecturer Paul McDonagh-Smith recommends treating vendor exits as staged migrations rather than one-time cutovers. "Proceed like a surgeon, not a butcher: map dependencies, shadow-run replacements for one cycle before decommissioning and negotiate from the renewal date backwards."

At a keynote fireside chat at the Asian Investment Conference, professor Simon Johnson said that while many businesses were showcasing how they were using AI to impress their customers and investors, they needed to go one step further. "The key is to think about how AI has expanded your capacities, as well as how it benefits your workers, your community and society as a whole – that's the story that needs to be told," he said.

When a technology lets people do the work themselves, demand for the service collapses. As research scientist Christian Catalini and collaborators have argued, when AI pushes the cost of execution towards zero, the binding constraint becomes human verification — our limited capacity to validate outcomes and take responsibility. Self-service offloads that burden onto the customer.

There might be some upsides in this future. Healthcare and education costs might fall because much of that expertise can be delivered, cheaper and easier, with AI-augmented tools, said principal research scientist Neil Thompson. Americans might be healthier and live longer lives thanks to AI-driven advancements in medicine. And underemployed workers might wind up with more hours of free time for creative pursuits.

The 2010 Dodd-Frank Act, which professor of the practice Gary Gensler helped implement after the global financial crisis, simply does not pertain to sports bets, he said. "Since antiquity, people have wanted to bet on sports and other things. So on some level, I understand the economic interest of the people setting up the platforms to fill that demand and compete with the casinos, FanDuels, and DraftKings of the world. But I do think that there's a misrepresentation of what we were doing in 2010," Gensler said.