Azucena Grady, assistant professor of international business, and David Moura, assistant teaching professor of management, guided students through a case study. Students worked in teams focused on finance, talent, operations and supervision, marketing and client experience, or strategy and corporate development.

Each team had about 15 minutes to develop 8 questions for each functional area, then select two to present to Porter.

Porter served as the former chair of �鶹��Ƶ’s Board of Trustees and is the owner and former managing partner of Baystate Financial, one of New England’s largest financial planning firms. During the discussion, he encouraged students to think critically about the values and habits that drive long-term success.

One of the central themes of Porter’s visit was organizational culture and the role leaders play in shaping it.

“Culture is what happens when I’m not there,” said Porter “If your professor doesn’t show up to class and you know you need to work through an activity for an hour and a half, what happens? Do a few students step up and lead the group through the questions, or does everyone just leave?”

Porter explained that the true test of an organization’s culture is what occurs when leaders are absent. Reflecting on his own experience, he recalled feeling confident in the culture he had built after returning from a two-week vacation and finding that the company continued to operate successfully without him.

Porter also challenged students to pursue growth by embracing discomfort and new experiences.

“Life starts at the end of your comfort zone,” he said. “Are you thriving or are you existing?”

Throughout the conversation, Porter emphasized the importance of understanding one’s competitive advantage. Whether interviewing for a job, pursuing a leadership role or entering a new industry, he encouraged students to take time to identify the qualities that set them apart.

“What’s your competitive advantage?” Porter asked. “You need to know that when you walk into an interview.”

Closing the discussion, Porter emphasized humility and servant leadership, encouraging students to put their egos aside and adopt a people-first mindset.

“If you have a people-first strategy, you are going to win every single time,” Porter said.

The summit brought students, faculty and industry professionals together for student sessions, a data challenge, poster presentations and an industry panel.

During a student session on responsible AI, �鶹��Ƶ alumnus Peyton Pesavento ’23, an enterprise AI strategy consultant at Accenture, urged students to understand a problem before asking AI to help solve it.

“Frame the real problem,” Pesavento said. “Don’t just tell the AI, ‘Hey, I’m trying to do this. Help me figure it out.’”

Pesavento presented with Accenture colleague Jared Skinner, a tech strategy senior manager. The speakers encouraged students to check the information they give AI, question its responses and bring examples of their work to job interviews.

In a second student session, Beca Mayr, vice president of talent acquisition at Sedgwick, shared how she combined her human resources experience with technical skills to build AI agents that support recruiting.

Students shared their own work during a networking lunch and poster session judged by members of the Center for Applied Analytics and AI Advisory Board. Takoda Moore ’27 and Sebastian Zucker-Malone ’27 earned first place for their market basket analysis project. Samantha Owens ’28 received second place for a project examining AI in hospitals.

For the Data Challenge, student teams used public data about housing and development in Alamance County. Four finalists presented findings drawn from building permits, tax parcels, municipal boundaries and other sources.

Moore, a financial technology major, and Zucker-Malone, a computer science major, joined Shayne Goldstein ’28, a computer science major, to win first place.

Their team initially tried to predict where development would occur. When their models failed to outperform a simple baseline, they changed their question to examine where development was least likely.

Carmine Familletti ’27, a finance major, and Carter May ’28, a finance and entrepreneurship and innovation major, placed second.

Third place went to Zach Conklin ’28, a finance and entrepreneurship and innovation major; Hodge Burkhardt ’27, a business analytics major; and Christopher Guider ’29, a business analytics and economics major.

The afternoon industry panel featured Elin Walton, vice president of marketing at Franzy; April Frazer ’03, CFO for corporate & investment bank at Wells Fargo; Brandon Richard, senior vice president at The Link Group; Jackie Tynan, data analytics manager for the City of Charlotte; and Steven Chen, head of services supply chain at Lenovo.

Richard discussed how his company is helping newer employees use AI while continuing to develop critical thinking and client relationship skills.

Frazer described how AI could help her team spend less time gathering financial information and more time investigating what the numbers mean. She also recalled challenging an AI tool after it provided incorrect information about Wells Fargo’s earnings.

“And you’ve got to make sure you’re testing it and you start to challenge it,” Frazer said.

Walton emphasized that people create value through how they use the technology.

“I believe it’s the humans using the technology who are creating the value,” Walton said. “But it also puts a different responsibility on the user as well, to provide the right context and the right data and the right information.”

“Talking with people in different roles allowed me to learn about their career paths, experiences, and responsibilities,” Reich said.

As a customer experience program specialist intern in Corning’s Optical Communications division, Reich divided her time between project work and meetings. She wanted to apply her studies at the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business while strengthening her communication, teamwork and problem-solving skills.

“Going into the internship, I wanted to gain hands-on experience and develop professional skills that I could not fully learn in a classroom setting,” Reich said.

Corning’s reputation initially drew her to the company. She also saw the internship as an opportunity to understand how business analytics concepts apply to business situations.

Her work week included time in the office Tuesday through Thursday and remote work on Mondays and Fridays, with her routine varying according to the needs of her project.

Alongside her assignments, connections with colleagues gave Reich a closer look at different professional roles and helped her consider possibilities for her own future.

“The internship was a chance to explore different career paths and gain a better understanding of the type of work I may want to pursue in the future,” she said.

“Your flights, hotel, plans and reservations end up scattered across a dozen apps, emails and screenshots, and when something goes wrong mid-trip you’re the one scrambling to fix it,” Sanchez said.

His answer was Trip Pilot, an organizer and in-trip companion designed to keep travel information in one place and help travelers handle problems as they happen.

Sanchez was one of 21 participants to pitch an idea on the opening night of Techstars Startup Weekend AI: Ideas in Action, held Oct. 2-4 in Winston-Salem. Trip Pilot was among six concepts selected by participants for development over the weekend.

Martha and Spencer Love School of Business students and alumni had a strong showing across the competition, helping develop the first- and second-place ventures while contributing to several other teams. The Doherty Center for Creativity, Innovation and Entrepreneurship served as a facilitator sponsor and helped send �鶹��Ƶ students to Winston-Salem, covering registration and lodging for participants.

Startup Weekend moves quickly. Participants pitch ideas Friday, form teams around selected concepts and spend the weekend testing those ideas with customers and mentors, developing business models and preparing final pitches for judges.

For Sanchez, that process changed Trip Pilot significantly.

“We started out targeting older travelers with a text-and-call AI assistant, then moved away from that and repositioned it as an organizer and companion rather than another planning or booking app,” Sanchez said.

By the end of the weekend, he had narrowed his audience to college students taking their first trips as independent adults. As the weekend progressed, Sanchez took on a larger role in developing and testing the idea.

“Working mostly on my own forced me to learn how to validate an idea, not just pitch it,” Sanchez said. “I built a simple survey to see if strangers cared, and I realized how much I had been guessing about my customer. I also learned I can keep going and lead even when things don’t go to plan.”

Sanchez is continuing to develop the concept through customer interviews, including conversations with �鶹��Ƶ students who have studied abroad.

Carmine Familletti ‘27, a finance and entrepreneurship major from Basking Ridge, N.J., took a different path into the weekend’s first-place venture. After listening to the opening-night pitches and talking with several teams, the idea behind Little Helper stood out to him.

is a safety application for children’s Windows PCs and Macs designed to identify potential signs of grooming, bullying or explicit content in online chats and alert parents.

“I spent time talking with other teams and testing their ideas, and this one stood out as the strongest, so I joined the team,” Familletti said.

Familletti served as chief financial officer, building the pricing model, calculating operating costs and developing a three-year financial plan. His financial work also influenced how the product was designed.

“I used that cost data to see which features were cheap and which were expensive to run,” Familletti said. “That helped us redesign the AI engine to be as cost-efficient as possible, cutting our AI cost from about $26 per family per month to about $1.20.”

By the final pitch, Familletti said the team had more than a concept to show the judges.

“We came in with more than an idea,” Familletti said. “By the final pitch, we had a working product, survey data from real parents, and financial numbers we could defend.”

Little Helper earned first place and received Sparq Coworking memberships, app development support from YohDev and a sponsored launch party to help the team continue developing the venture.

Gabi Czerveny ’27, a marketing major from Charlotte, N.C., joined Transfer Ready, a concept pitched by �鶹��Ƶ alumnus Aaron Satko ’25 after his own experience trying to buy a business.

“He was like, ‘I have an idea for putting the value from the CEO’s head back into the business,’” Czerveny said.

The team developed the concept around helping business owners capture knowledge that might otherwise exist primarily in their heads before retiring or selling the company.

For Czerveny, part of the work was helping the team turn a wide range of ideas into a focused concept.

“We had a lot of ideas on the table, so I helped us narrow in on what we could realistically accomplish over the weekend,” Czerveny said.

She also helped refine the team’s presentation, cutting down slides and making sure the final pitch clearly communicated the idea.

Transfer Ready earned second place and the Social Impact Award, recognizing the venture’s potential to support business and wealth transfer, particularly for minority- and women-owned businesses.

“They said that was so important, especially for small towns, because there are so many small businesses and a lot of them shut down when an owner leaves,” Czerveny said. “Our idea was to keep these companies that have been in business, in business.”

The team also received Sparq Coworking memberships and development support from Sigma Software Vertex to continue building the venture.

The Transfer Ready team also included �鶹��Ƶ students Pierson Norris ’27, Aaron Grubman ’29 and Murray Marks Jr. ’28, along with alumni Joshua Mason ’25 and Satko. Kathy Atwiine ’29 participated on another team during the weekend.

Czerveny’s role with Startup Weekend began before the competition. As a Techstars student ambassador, she helped recruit �鶹��Ƶ participants and worked with Ashley Wilcox, director of the Doherty Center, to get students involved.

Wilcox also traveled to Winston-Salem and served as a judge during the weekend.

“The experience exposed us to different people, perspectives and ideas than we might otherwise encounter,” Czerveny said. “I would mainly suggest that people go to push themselves out of their comfort zones. There are always new ideas there that you would never think of. You really leave the weekend feeling refreshed and focused”

Familletti echoed that advice for students considering a future Startup Weekend.

“Just do it,” Familletti said. “Whatever your skill set, and whatever you do or don’t know going in, the competition will push you to learn something new.”

Those challenges were at the center of the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business’s Family Entrepreneurship Forum on Sept. 25, which brought leading scholars and practitioners together with students, alumni and business-owning families during Family Weekend.

Organized by David Jiang, associate professor of management and entrepreneurship, the forum, “How Families Create Opportunity Across Generations,” combined research-informed expert insight with interactive conversations about leadership, governance, succession and entrepreneurship.

The program featured several nationally recognized scholars in family business and entrepreneurship from UNC Charlotte, N.C. State University, and UNC Greensboro, along with Steve Miller, former executive vice president and the most senior non-family executive in the history of the Biltmore Estate and co-founder of UNC Chapel Hill’s Family Enterprise Center.

Miller opened the forum by drawing on nearly four decades of experience with the Vanderbilt/Cecil family-owned Biltmore Estate and focused on three priorities for family enterprises: ownership, leadership development and “working on the family as hard as you work on the business.”

“That sometimes gets neglected,” Miller said. “So it’s really important.”

He emphasized the need for families to have a shared vision for the future of the enterprise.

“It was amazing when we talked to, particularly when many family members were involved, about what your vision was for the family firm,” Miller said. “They may have different opinions about that and never really talked about it.”

Miller also stressed the importance of preparing future leaders through meaningful responsibility and challenging work.

“In terms of training the next-generation leader, provide them with work assignments that really are challenging,” he said.

Biltmore’s own history, he said, shows how differences in vision can shape a family enterprise and how clearer communication and shared stewardship can help guide it forward.

Following the keynote, participants joined two rounds of small-group discussions facilitated by:

• Franz Kellermanns, Addison H. & Gertrude C. Reese Endowed Chair in International Business and Distinguished Professor of Management at UNC Charlotte, on family succession conflicts.
• Torsten Pieper, professor of management at UNC Charlotte and editor-in-chief of the Journal of Family Business Strategy, on family offices, entrepreneurship and philanthropy.
• Jon Carr, Jenkins Distinguished Professor of Entrepreneurship at NC State University, on families as catalysts for entrepreneurship.
• Esra Memili, professor of entrepreneurship and Margaret Van Hoy Hill Dean’s Notable Scholar at UNC Greensboro, on family and wealth governance.
• David Jiang and Steve Miller, on preparing the next generation for success.

“Since every family and family business is different, there is no one-size-fits-all model or approach,” said Esra Memili, professor of entrepreneurship at UNC Greensboro.

The small-group format gave families space to ask questions, share experiences and talk through issues they may be facing in their own businesses.

“Family Weekend gave us a unique opportunity to bring students and their families into the same conversation,” Jiang said. “And these conversations aren’t just for established business owners. Any family can work together to pool resources, bear risks, and support one another in ways that can open new opportunities.”

The annual experience uses Charlotte as a classroom, helping students connect business education with the economic and social forces shaping the city.

Thomas Flaherty ’27, an entrepreneurship and innovation major, said the tour challenged some of his assumptions about affordable housing.

“The bus tour really changed my perception because the housing was actually really nice, clean and friendly-looking,” Flaherty said. “There were lots of trees and people walking around, so it showed how the housing met people’s living needs.”

Ian Knarr ’30, an economics major, came away with a different perspective on the city itself.

“Usually, when you see a city, you only see one part of it, but we got to see so many parts and how every part is different from each other,” Knarr said.

Trapani encouraged students to think about how understanding a place can shape the way they engage with its challenges.

“Things don’t just change. You have to change them,” Trapani told students. “It is important in order for you to become a full member of society to understand what you deeply care about and fight for it.”

Hanchett discussed how federal and local policies shaped Charlotte’s neighborhoods and development patterns and why understanding that history matters for future business and community leaders.

“The stories that I’m telling are stories that you will find everywhere in the U.S.,” Hanchett said. “It is hard sometimes to see them, but it shapes who we are.”

Dodson introduced students to DreamKey Partners’ work in affordable and mixed-income housing, including the Brightwalk development near uptown Charlotte. Students learned about the financing, partnerships and long-term planning involved in developing mixed-income communities and how those projects can affect surrounding neighborhoods.

“It is not just about housing,” Dodson said. “By building this community, we became an economic catalyst.”

Amarina Beard-Galati ’28, an entrepreneurship and innovation major, said traveling along Central Avenue highlighted another dimension of the city.

“Seeing all these shops and all these cultures that people have created is a sign that people want to come together and create a community that embraces us all,” Beard-Galati said.

For students in the Center for Humanity in Business program, Charlotte will become an even larger part of their �鶹��Ƶ experience when they spend their fourth year living in the city and completing a co-op experience tied to responsible management practices and their career interests.

Meira Flavin ’30, a marketing major, said the visit shifted her understanding of Charlotte.

“Coming into this experience, I had a preconceived notion of what Charlotte was,” Flavin said. “That changed today.”

It started as a conversation between friends. A memory from the Ecuadorian Amazon. A question asked after a trip that left them curious about guayusa, a leaf long consumed by Indigenous communities for focus and energy. It had become months of supplier calls, product tests, faculty feedback, formulation decisions and late nights spent figuring out how to turn a shared vision into something real.

Now, the plant-based energy drink they built together is ready for distribution and is being sold at The Oak House at �鶹��Ƶ.

For Vargas-Lopez and Chiriboga, the milestone carries them back to McEwen Dining Hall on campus, where their friendship began during their first year at �鶹��Ƶ in 2022.

Chiriboga, an entrepreneurship major from Quito, Ecuador, and Vargas-Lopez, a sport management major from Austin, Texas, quickly connected over language, culture, soccer and a shared curiosity about the world. They became close friends long before they became business partners.

The idea for YAPA came later, after Chiriboga brought Vargas-Lopez to visit his home country during Thanksgiving break of their sophomore year. It was Vargas-Lopez’s first time in South America, and the trip included time in the Amazon rainforest, where the two were struck by what Chiriboga describes as the “immensity” of the Amazon, from its abundance of life to the plants that have long shaped daily living in the region.

“We came back from visiting the Amazon forest and were just talking through the trip,” Vargas-Lopez says. “That’s when the idea came out. What if we took one of those plants and built a drink around it?”

That question became YAPA, a plant-based energy drink made from guayusa and a larger idea of giving people something more than expected.

The company’s name comes from an Andean expression. In Ecuador, “yapa” refers to a small token added with generosity. At a market, it might be an extra piece of fruit. At a family table, it might be a little more food on someone’s plate.

“It’s a little extra you were not expecting,” Chiriboga says. “That is what we want the product to feel like.”

Building From the Ground Up

Once the idea took hold, Vargas-Lopez and Chiriboga began studying the beverage industry, talking with community members in Ecuador, seeking feedback from mentors and testing whether their concept could become a real business.

They were drawn to the growing interest in cleaner, more transparent beverage options.

“I think the issue we were looking at was the energy drink industry and what a lot of those products contain,” Chiriboga says. “We saw people looking more for clean-label, natural ingredients and more transparency in what they consume.”

That focus helped define YAPA’s direction. They describe the drink as plant-based and made without preservatives, with an emphasis on ingredient transparency, quality and sourcing. Its ingredients include guayusa along with hibiscus, turmeric, ginger, prebiotics and electrolytes, each chosen with a purpose.

For the founders, the product also carries a connection to the place that inspired it.

We came back from visiting the Amazon forest and were just talking through the trip. That’s when the idea came out. What if we took one of those plants and built a drink around it? — Bernardo Vargas-Lopez ’26

In the Amazon, Chiriboga says, guayusa is traditionally consumed in community. People gather early in the morning, drink together and share their dreams before beginning the day. The leaf is associated with focus and energy, but not the jittery rush often linked with conventional energy drinks.

“It gives you that mental clarity and that energy that you need without being hyper,” Chiriboga says.

Turning that inspiration into a company required more than enthusiasm. The two spent months working through sourcing, formulation, packaging, shipping, pricing and compliance while balancing college life.

They also made early decisions about where they would not compromise, even when higher standards meant harder financial choices.

“We decided there were a few strategic points where we would not go for lower quality,” Chiriboga says. “Starting from ingredients and sourcing, we were not going to sacrifice what the product stands for.”

Asking the Right Questions

Both founders say their experience in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business gave them the confidence to approach YAPA not as a finished idea, but as something to test, refine and keep improving.

They turned to faculty members including Sean McMahon, professor of entrepreneurship; Elena Kennedy, associate professor of entrepreneurship; and Brittany Mercado, associate professor of management and chair of the Department of Management and Entrepreneurship.

“The ability to communicate clearly with people who know a lot more than we do has been huge,” Vargas-Lopez says. “The Love School of Business does an amazing job of making professors approachable.”

As YAPA developed, informal conversations became intentional. They stayed after class, brought specific questions to faculty and connected what they were learning in their courses to the choices they were making for the company. The feedback was not always easy, and that was part of its value.

“We don’t need people to just cheerlead,” Vargas-Lopez says. “We need people who will tell us what worked, what didn’t and how to improve. That’s what has really helped us move forward.”

Their time studying abroad also shaped the venture. Chiriboga was in Japan while
Vargas-Lopez was in Australia, making day-to-day operations difficult, so they used the distance to listen.

“We couldn’t really work on operations, so the only thing we could do was talk to people,” Chiriboga says.

They spoke with people in the Amazon, professionals at large companies and mentors in finance, gathering insight before returning to campus.

“We were sponges during that time,” Chiriboga says. “We just gathered as much information as we could.”

A Friendship First

Before they were co-founders, Vargas-Lopez and Chiriboga were friends. They built the kind of trust that later became essential to starting a company together. When one person could not take on a task, the other stepped in. When the work became overwhelming, the friendship helped steady them.

“If I cannot do something right now, I know Juan Daniel can do it, and vice versa,” Vargas-Lopez says. “That trust was built before the business.”

Living together strengthened that rhythm. It also taught them the importance of boundaries.

“We’ve gotten really good at knowing when to talk business and when not to,” Chiriboga says. “If it’s not working time, we try to focus on being friends and being present with other people.”

For Vargas-Lopez, the partnership has been less about dividing every task evenly and more about sharing responsibility over time.

“It’s not always 50-50 all the time,” he says. “But we know we’re in this together, and that makes it easier to handle everything that comes up.”

For Chiriboga, building YAPA with his best friend has been one of the most meaningful parts of the experience.

“I couldn’t be more grateful that my best friend is also my business partner,” he says.

Now based in Austin, Vargas-Lopez and Chiriboga are carrying YAPA into its next stage. The venture that started as a conversation between friends has become something people can open, taste and share.

The process has changed how they think about risk, learning and what it means to build something from scratch. It has also reinforced the value of starting before everything feels certain.

“Don’t be afraid to start,” Chiriboga says. “If you don’t believe in yourself, no one else will.”

Vargas-Lopez says the venture has taught him to stay open to what others know and humble enough to keep asking questions.

“Use your resources,” he says. “Ask questions. Learn from every conversation. We haven’t had a single meeting where we didn’t learn something.”

The study, “,” looked at whether the growing availability of generative AI has changed who enters the video game market and how developers use AI in the creative process.

Kim and his co-authors analyzed more than 66,000 developers whose first game was published on Steam between 2014 and 2025. They found that more indie developers entered the platform in 2024 and 2025 than earlier trends predicted, while new non-indie developers remained within the expected range.

Key findings

• More indie developers entered the market after generative AI became widely available. The increase was greater than researchers’ models predicted based on previous trends.
• Images were the most common use of AI. Both indie and non-indie developers most often reported using AI to generate images, while use for music, voice and coding was lower.
• Indie developers used AI differently. Compared with non-indie developers, indie developers were more likely to use AI for music and coding.
• AI was associated with shorter indie games. The researchers say this may reflect AI’s usefulness in helping developers quickly develop and test ideas.
• The study shows an association, not causation. The researchers do not conclude that generative AI caused more indie developers to enter the market.

Kim plans to bring the research into his business analytics courses.

“I will use this paper in class to demonstrate the positive role of AI in facilitating human creativity by enabling individuals to quickly prototype and implement their ideas,” Kim said.

The research was published in ACM AI Letters by the Association for Computing Machinery and co-authored with Seonbin Jo and Woo-Sung Jung of Pohang University of Science and Technology and Jisung Yoon of the KDI School of Public Policy and Management.

Kim joined �鶹��Ƶ in Fall 2023 from Boston University. His expertise includes business analytics, innovation, misinformation, and computational social science. He is currently the director of the Center for Applied Analytics and AI at �鶹��Ƶ.

He started over.

Taylor was leading about 1,200 employees when he told company leaders he eventually wanted to run a business. Their response: He needed to learn how to build brands. So the engineer and plant manager moved into marketing, working alongside colleagues who were much earlier in their careers.

“It was a wonderful lesson in humility,” Taylor said. “It was a great chance to learn and to be in the learning mode, not the knowing mode.”

That willingness to keep learning became a recurring theme on Sept. 10 in LaRose Digital Theatre at the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business.

The conversation was moderated by Jack Ryan P’17, founder and principal of Jack Ryan Advisory and chair of the Love School of Business Board of Advisors.

Taylor spent more than 40 years with P&G, with assignments across the United States, Asia and Europe before eventually becoming chairman, president and CEO. Today, he serves as senior operating adviser to Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, chairman of the supervisory board of Opella Healthcare Group and non-executive chair of Delta Air Lines’ board of directors.

When Ryan asked what advice he would give students preparing to enter the workforce, Taylor pushed back on the idea that there is one ideal first assignment.

“Many people ask me, ‘What’s the right first assignment? Do I need to start in marketing or sales?’” Taylor said. “It doesn’t matter. What matters is what you do with the first assignment. Do you come into whatever you’re asked to do and do it with excellence?”

He said that strong work creates the credibility to take on larger challenges and eventually influence the organization itself.

“If you really want to change the system, be successful at wherever you are,” Taylor said. “That gives you a platform to be able to change the system. You build credibility that you can accomplish outcomes, and once you do that, the willingness for others to listen to you grows.”

Taylor said one of the strongest differentiators he has seen among successful leaders is their ability to bring out the best in the people around them.

“The greatest differentiator I’ve seen in my time with P&G, my time at Delta and now working with a private equity company is often their ability to unleash those around them,” Taylor said. “Those that have relatively little ego, but a high level of achievement, a high level of personal accountability and a high level of empathy for others.”

That combination, he said, creates something leaders cannot achieve on their own.

“What happens is they generate followership,” Taylor said. “That creates wonderful outcomes, especially when you get to mid- and higher levels, because the group amplifies the results.”

Students later turned the conversation toward artificial intelligence, asking Taylor what skills they should focus on as AI changes marketing and business.

Taylor said AI is already helping companies create and analyze content more quickly, but technology does not replace the need to understand the people a business serves.

“When we go to markets, the first meeting is in homes,” Taylor said. “We’d get to know the person. We’d learn about their life, their kids. ‘Tell us what you do each day.’”

He said those visits allowed teams to observe what consumers actually did, not just what they said they needed.

“You find there’s a lot of compensating behaviors consumers have,” Taylor said. “They’ll say, ‘This is not an issue,’ but you see they do an extra step because something doesn’t work the way they think it should.”

Taylor shared examples from P&G’s work in markets around the world, including observing how consumers washed their hair in rural China and how a consumer in Japan used Febreze on furniture she wished she could wash.

“You don’t see that looking at a sheet of paper,” Taylor said.

For Taylor, AI can accelerate the work once a company understands the problem it is trying to solve.

“AI will let you have faster, better answers once you know what to work on,” Taylor said. “What mountain do you want to climb? And that often comes from a better consumer insight and empathy.”

For the final student question, Taylor was asked whether there was one piece of advice he had used as a filter when making major decisions throughout his career.

His answer brought the conversation back to learning.

“Probably the simplest one is: Can I make a difference, and can I learn?” Taylor said.

He encouraged students to consider those questions as they evaluate their own opportunities, rather than getting caught up in salary, job titles or whether an assignment appears prestigious.

“Pick a place that you’re happy to walk in the door every day, you can hold your head up, you can learn and you can make a difference,” Taylor said. “You have talents and the ability to do a ton of things. You get to choose how you use those.”

�鶹��Ƶ Lessons from Leaders

Launched in 2017 by Dean Emeritus Raghu Tadepalli, Lessons from Leaders brings senior executives to campus for open talks, small group discussions and purposeful one-on-one networking that connects students with mentors. The program helps bridge classroom learning to real-world decision-making and strategy, and aims for every student to leave with a new contact and meaningful career insights.

This marks the tenth consecutive year that �鶹��Ƶ’s chapter has been honored with either a Merit or Superior Merit Award by the national Society for Human Resource Management, highlighting the organization’s commitment to professional development and its strong presence on campus.

�鶹��Ƶ’s chapter is advised by Professor Brian Lyons and led by a dedicated executive board of students who are passionate about advancing their skills and engaging with the HR community.

“We are incredibly proud to receive the Superior Merit Award for another year, as it reflects the hard work, dedication, and passion our members bring to the SHRM chapter. This recognition highlights not only the initiatives and professional development opportunities we have created, but also the strong community our members have built together,” said Isabelle Cross ’27, a human resource management major. “As we look to the future, we are excited to grow our presence on campus, strengthen our connections with HR professionals, and create meaningful opportunities that help our members prepare for successful careers.”

The SHRM Student Chapter Merit Award program encourages student chapters to develop more effective operations and promote the value of the human resource profession through outstanding activities and projects.

“Earning a fourth consecutive Superior Merit Award from national SHRM is a remarkable accomplishment and speaks to the sustained commitment of the club’s student leaders and members,” said Brian Lyons, professor of management and the club’s faculty advisor. “What makes this recognition especially meaningful is that it reflects years of students building upon the work of the executive board leaders who came before them, while continuing to find new ways to create engaging professional development opportunities, strengthen connections with the local and national HR community, and promote the HRM major and minor on campus. I’m incredibly proud of Isabelle’s leadership and the strong culture of engagement and excellence that our students have sustained over time.”