Conversations on Careers and Professional Life

Show Notes — Anshula Singh | AI Ready on Day One

Series: AI Ready on Day One Show: Conversations on Careers and Professional Life

About This Episode

Anshula Singh came into Foster's MBA program with five years of software engineering experience — building products at Salesforce and ServiceNow, working with machine learning, helping train early LLMs from the inside. She wasn't new to AI. She was already watching it closely.

In her second winter quarter, she took Software Entrepreneurship — a course where students pitch ideas on day two, form teams, and spend ten weeks building a company. Anshula's team built Authscript, an AI platform to automate prior authorization forms in healthcare. They got far enough to pitch in front of VCs.

Then new federal legislation made their product obsolete almost overnight.

In this conversation, Anshula talks about what it takes to build an AI startup under time pressure, what the experience taught her about when to use AI and when not to, and her advice for business students figuring out where they fit in a landscape that keeps shifting.

Key Takeaways

Know when to kill the idea. Find your idea killer early — before you're burning capital defending a thesis that no longer holds.

Customer discovery still beats AI research. The most valuable insights came from talking to people. AI supported the market sizing; the real signal came from humans in the room.

Make AI work with how you already work. Don't reinvent yourself for the tool. Figure out where AI makes you more productive in your existing workflow, and start there.

Keep your own voice. As models improve, your distinct perspective becomes more important, not less.

AI is ambient infrastructure. The question isn't whether it changes your work — it will. The question is how you position yourself within that change.

About Anshula Singh

Anshula Singh is an MBA candidate at the UW Foster School of Business. Prior to Foster, she spent five years as a software engineer at Salesforce and ServiceNow, where she worked on machine learning applications and contributed to early large language model development.

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Conversations on Careers and Professional Life is hosted by Gregory Heller and produced at the UW Foster School of Business.

Two questions are on every student's mind right now: How will AI affect the job I'm trying to get? And how do I show up actually ready to use it?

AI Ready  — a miniseries from Conversations on Careers and Professional Life -- will feature students from Foster's MBA and graduate programs talking honestly about how they're learning to work with AI. In the classroom. In recruiting. In the work they're already doing.

Foster launched an AI strategy this year built around a straightforward premise: graduates should leave ready to use AI as a real professional tool. That means a required AI bootcamp, a hackathon, and courses designed around practical AI applications in business.

I wanted to hear from the students themselves — what's actually landing, what surprised them, and what they think employers need to understand about this generation of graduates.

Coming This Season

Conversations with Foster students and faculty on:

• Building real AI products with no prior technical background
• Using AI in startup development and pitch competitions
• What cognitive offloading actually costs you — and how to avoid it
• Keeping humans in the loop when the tools keep getting better
• What "AI ready" looks like in practice, not just on paper

Ted Jordan spent 24 years at Microsoft as a global program and account manager before becoming a consultant, professional speaker, and guest lecturer at UW Foster School of Business. His talk — From Outsider to Ally — reframes how we think about networking: less about tactics, more about making the other person feel seen.

In this conversation, Ted shares the specific approaches he used to build relationships inside one of the world's most complex organizations — and what he teaches MBA students about doing the same.

What we cover

• The subject line that gets a response every time
• Why curiosity is more valuable than a great question list
• How to turn a single conversation into an ongoing relationship
• The unsolicited message that makes you unforgettable to a hiring manager
• What new interns and first-year employees consistently get wrong
• Why your network becomes your sales force when you're in transition
• How Ted got his job at Microsoft — from a lunch invite and a three-word email

Key takeaways

1. Signal that you see someone as an expert — before you ask for anything
2. Follow the thread, not your script
3. Close the loop: act on advice, then report back
4. Your immediate colleagues are your most underused network
5. Depth beats breadth — stay long enough to become indispensable

Connect with Ted LinkedIn — Ted Jordan or visit TedJordanTalks.com to learn more about Ted.

Conversations on Careers and Professional Life is hosted by Gregory Heller, career coach and communication instructor at UW Foster School of Business.

Layoffs are back in the headlines. Job postings are down. Hiring cycles are longer.

What does that mean for MBA students and other professionals navigating today's market?

In this episode, I speak with Steve Jaffe, author of The Layoff Journey: From Dismissal to Discovery. Drawing on his experience of four layoffs across a 25-year marketing career, Steve maps job loss—and prolonged job search—to the seven stages of grief.

This conversation is both practical and deeply human.

You'll learn:

• Why career disruptions are emotional, not just logistical — and how naming the grief process reduces shame.

• How to separate your identity from your job title before you're forced to.

• Why networking before you need it is the ultimate resilience strategy in a market shaped by AI screening and hidden job opportunities.

• How hope and small daily wins compound over time, especially during a long job search.

Whether you've been laid off, are facing a challenging search, or simply want to future-proof your career, this episode offers a grounded framework for building resilience that lasts.

Learn more about Steve and his book at TheSteveJaffe.com.

Check out previous episodes on Resilience and Stress with Polo DeCano, Self-Compassion with Jane Compson, Gratitude with Ryan Fehr, Self-Compassion with Andy Hafenbrack, and plenty of episodes that talk about networking.

In this episode I break down the difference between slide decks and slide docs—and talk about designing intentionally for each.

Many presentation problems don't stem from weak ideas or poor analysis. They come from using the wrong artifact for the job. Slides overloaded with text are often treated as presentations when they're really documents meant to be read. The result? Confused audiences, long meetings, and diluted messages.

I explain why slide decks and slide docs serve fundamentally different purposes—and why trying to make one file do both almost always fails.

In this episode, you'll learn:

• Why slide decks are spoken artifacts designed to support your voice, not replace it

• How slide docs function as read artifacts that must stand on their own without explanation

• A simple rule of thumb to help you choose the right format before you start building

Whether you're preparing for class presentations, team meetings, interviews, or client-facing work, understanding this distinction will immediately improve your clarity and credibility.