Sep 23
12:00PM – 1:00PM
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2026-09-23T12:00:00
2026-09-23T13:00:00
America/New_York
Yale Club of DC AI Masterclass Series | Working with AI as an Individual and a Business: Beyond The Prompt
The Yale Club of Washington, DC welcomes alumni to an AI Masterclass Series featuring Aditya Nair, a Yale alum and a global expert on applied AI in regulated industries.
Aditya runs an AI engineering firm, which builds production AI systems for enterprise clients, and is a fractional leader to professional services firms rebuilding their operating model for the AI era. He’s built AI strategy and systems for Fortune 500 companies, sovereign wealth funds, government agencies and AI-native startups.
AI is a full systems problem. Trying to tackle it in parts is the mistake that hampers its effectiveness. Aditya works with boards and executives on where AI moves the shape of a firm, builds the production systems that carry the change through, and designs curriculum to raise the skill of the people who must work with these systems.
The organizations that get AI right treat it as infrastructure for how the work gets done. The ones that struggle treat it as a productivity tool bolted onto existing roles.
This Masterclass is a two-part series. In part one, we focus on making you an AI-native operator. In part two, we turn your firm into an AI-native entity.
AI Masterclass 1: BEYOND THE PROMPT
Most people using AI are stuck on the surface. They learn to copy the prompts, get the superficial results and are overwhelmed with every new product that launches. Two things separate them from the people getting real work out of these tools versus those who are overwhelmed. The first is how clearly you frame what you want and how hard you make the AI check its own output. We'll build that around five pillars. Prompts, context, intent, specifications, and evaluations. A weak output is usually a sign that something in these five got missed.
The second is knowing what sits around the model and how to use it to your advantage. Every agent on the market, Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, and whatever new Claw variant launches next month, wraps the same four things around a language model. Context, tools, skills, and memory. The identity file your agent reads before every conversation. The tools are what surfaces you give your model access to so it can do work for you. Skills that pin down how you like to get your work done, so the agent stops guessing. Memory gives the AI context of everything you have done and want to get done so it understands you better.
Stop shopping for agents. Become the operator who can build and run them.
AI Masterclass 2: THE NEW RULES OF ADVANTAGE
Knowledge work rewarded planning because mistakes were expensive. You thought hard before you built, because building the wrong thing cost you a couple of quarters and a lot of your allocated budget, so the efficient move was to argue it out on paper first. That has inverted.
The startup version of the story is well covered. AI-native startups now reach $100 Mn in ARR fast than ever before and with fewer employees. The harder question is what it does to a company with 4,000 people, a five-year plan, and a tried and tested business model do? The short answer that firms haven't as yet intuited is that the cost structure has changed.
Where you point your best people changes, because pushing the frontiers of innovation may be more valuable than enabling the core of the business. What investment bets do you make changes, because you can afford to be wrong more often. And the market you walked away from years ago, the one that wanted what you sell and couldn't pay what you charge, maybe worth repricing. In this webinar, we look at reimagining the operations of a firm from the lens of abundant intelligence.
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What role does reading play in shaping a meaningful and intellectually vibrant life? Join Yale Alumni College for the inaugural John Johnson Memorial Lecture, featuring distinguished faculty member and acclaimed author Priscilla Gilman presenting "Reading for Life: Why Lifelong Learning Matters." Established in memory of John Morris Johnson '71, a devoted board member and enthusiastic lifelong learner, his leadership, participation, and friendship, helped foster a community united by a shared passion for ideas and discovery. This lecture celebrates the power of books, ideas, and ongoing discovery throughout all stages of life.
