Published: December 2, 2025
In our latest episode in the Resoundingly Human podcast refresh, Ramayya Krishnan, Carnegie Mellon University, and plenary speaker at the 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting, shares how today’s rapid advances in AI technology create new opportunities for synergy with OR/MS, with broad implications for workforce development, public policy and education.
You have a workforce consisting of human workers and AI bots. The question is what decision rights do we choose to give, and what kinds of tasks are they allowed to perform autonomously, or whatnot. But the first in the order of questions deciding that will then have consequences for what work are human agents going to do. And it's not about assuming that we have a fixed pie, and AI is going to do more of it and therefore leaving less for us to do. The pie itself is likely to grow. So there are new kinds of work that might emerge that you and I are not contemplating today. But as those new kinds of work emerge, you need to ask the question in a data-driven way. How might I be able to take skills that I have, determine which of those skills are going to be relevant for this new occupation, and which of these skills am I going to have to acquire? And yes, you can imagine this type of thinking is very much in the spirit of OR/MS. There's an interesting policy level question, which is what kind of policies do we want to put in place to ensure that the kind of world that emerges is one which is human centered?
Interviewed this episode:
Ramayya Krishnan
Carnegie Mellon University
Ramayya Krishnan is the Dean Emeritus and W. W. Cooper and Ruth F. Cooper Professor of Management Science and Information Systems at the Heinz College Information Systems and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University. He is an expert in data and decision analytics and digital transformation. He served as President of INFORMS in 2019 and helped lead the creation of its AI strategy. He is an AAAS Fellow (section T), an INFORMS Fellow, and an elected member of the National Academy of Public Administration. He chaired the AI futures Committee of the National AI Advisory Committee to the President and the White House office of AI Initiatives office and is chair of the DOD’s RAI academic council. He directs the CMU-NIST cooperative research center on AI measurement science and engineering.
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Ramayya Krishnan, 2025 INFORMS Annual Meeting plenary speaker