The Harvard Business School (HBS) recently caught the attention of the New York Times after the launch of its new Foundry Bootcamp — an 8-week program for tech founders to shape their ideas into a funding-ready pitch. A.I. generated avatars of HBS faculty teach the course.
Join us for an ethics exchange with HBS faculty Nien-hê Hsieh, Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration, and Mikael Johansson, CTO of Renable Marketing for a conversation about the use of A.I. clones at HBS and beyond.
Lunch will be provided.
Nien-hê Hsieh is the Kim B. Clark Professor of Business Administration in the General Management Unit at Harvard Business School. His research and teaching aims at helping business leaders and organizations determine and deliver on their responsibilities. He also studies what human values require for economic policies and institutions. Professor Hsieh teaches Leadership and Corporate Accountability (LCA) to first-year MBA students and Executive Education participants, and serves as Course Head for LCA. At Harvard University, he serves on the faculty committees for the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics, the Berkman Klein Center for Internet and Society, and the Scholars at Risk Program.
Professor Hsieh's work has been published in Business Ethics Quarterly, Economics and Philosophy, The Journal of Political Philosophy, Philosophy and Public Affairs, Social Theory and Practice, Utilitas, and various other journals. He is a past president of the Society for Business Ethics.
Professor Hsieh holds a B.A. in Economics from Swarthmore College, an M.Phil. in Politics from Oxford University, and a Ph.D. in Economics from Harvard University. He joined the faculty from The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, where he was an associate professor of legal studies and business ethics and served as co-director of the Wharton Ethics Program. Before joining the faculty at Wharton in 2001, he was a Postdoctoral Fellow at Harvard Business School, and he has held visiting fellowships at Harvard University, Oxford University, and the Research School for Social Sciences at the Australian National University.
Mikael Johansson is a tech leader from Sweden with long experience in management, product and engineering roles. He's the founder of Verke, an app with AI coaches grounded in different schools of psychotherapy. With Verke he's hoping to aid people around the world who might not otherwise find help due to societal stigma, cost concerns or other reasons. Two of Verke's coaches has been trialled with 100 adults at Stockholm University. Another of Verke's coaches is being piloted in psychology training at Uppsala University, where the AI coach Vera creates simulated clients for students to practice difficult scenarios in the safe setting of an AI voice call.
In his role as people manager Mikael has also been doing in-the-field experiments with AI-assisted management. Most recently having a panel of AI's interview him over many rounds to build a "Mikael agent" to help employees prepare for career and personal development sessions, or just get a second perspective and being able to quickly ask "what might Mikael say about this?" In this session Mikael might share some anecdotes about why many people liked having an AI manager agent, and why some absolutely hated it.
About The Ethics Exchange
Ideas take on a different shape when they’re shared around a table. The Ethics Exchange is a series at the Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics that gathers our community over lunch in the Dennis F. Thompson Seminar Room to think aloud about questions that matter. Building on the traditions of Ethics in Your World and Ethics Mondays, the series alternates between two formats: some sessions are open conversations, guided by a short reading or prompt; others feature invited speakers who share their work before opening the floor for dialogue. The aim is not to deliver neat answers but to create a space for genuine exchange—of ideas, perspectives, and disagreements—in an informal and engaging setting. Come with curiosity, and leave with sharper questions, new connections, and of course, full bellies.
This event is free and open to the public, but registration is required.
All attendees must agree to the Chatham House Rule: participants are free to use information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speakers may be revealed.
LOCATION:Dennis F. Thompson Seminar Room, Edmond & Lily Safra Center for Ethics STATUS:CONFIRMED DTSTART:20261026T160000Z DTEND:20261026T170000Z END:VEVENT END:VCALENDAR