Innovation Leader at Microsoft to Direct New AI Institute

Q&A with Taylor Black

by Dave Hazen

Taylor Black, director of AI & Venture Ecosystems in the Office of the CTO at Microsoft, has been named the founding director for The Catholic University of America’s new interdisciplinary institute on artificial intelligence and emerging technologies.

This conversation has been edited for clarity. 

DH: You have a fairly eclectic background. Could you tell us about your academic and professional formation?

Taylor Black: I went to undergrad at Gonzaga University, where I majored in philosophy and classics, and

 was a course away from a biochemistry major. I also completed an Honors business degree through the Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program.

While at Gonzaga, I started a couple of businesses and helped found the New Venture Lab, a kind of venture studio model in the business school. 

I got bit by the Lonergan bug and went to get a master's in cognitional theory from the philosophy department at Boston College. 

I then went to law school at Boston College. To pay the bills, I drew on something I'd been doing as a side gig during undergrad. I had taught myself how to program on the web stack in high school, so I built websites and did design and development work.

While in grad school, I bumped into Paul Camacho, who now teaches philosophy at Villanova and is my best friend. We started an agency together, building sites for clients ranging from Fortune 500 companies to mom-and-pop shops. 

We realized we were building out the same kind of functionality for many different customers, so we turned it into a B2B product company during my first year of law school. I got my JD, but never ended up practicing as an attorney because the business was doing well. 

DH: How did you end up at Microsoft?

TB: I sold my company in 2015, did consulting work with T-Mobile, Disney, ESPN, and Intellectual Ventures, and taught data visualization and business intelligence at smaller universities in the Seattle area.

Then I started working for a client at a venture fund. They were shifting from a licensing-based model to a venture studio model, and because of my experience as a startup founder, they wanted me to help run operations during the transition. In five years, we spun out about two dozen companies that have raised over $700 million in outside capital in deep tech spaces like satellites, metamaterials, and nuclear ventures.

When we opted not to raise a fourth fund and were winding down operations, Microsoft reached out. I built the venture studio in the CTO's office. Instead of spinning companies out externally, we'd spin them out as internal businesses that would go live in other parts of the company. A handful of those are still growing across the company, generating hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue.

Now I mostly teach other incubation units inside the company how to follow our methodologies. I also run our monthly peer-reviewed conference in AI, machine learning, and data science. 

Partnership with Catholic University

DH: How did your partnership with Catholic University come about?

TB: A friend said he had colleagues at The Catholic University of America who were trying to wrap their heads around AI as it relates to the mission of the university. Would I mind jumping on a call with them?

I said sure. I work in Microsoft's CTO office, so I live and breathe AI, but I've also spent a lot of time thinking about how education and human formation should work. I was so excited after that call that I wrote up a document with my thoughts and sent it over. 

Joe [Yost, senior vice provost for research] called and said, "We want you to do it." 

DH: What in your view are the most pressing issues for this institute to address?

TB: First, I have secular colleagues asking me, "What does it mean to be human?" Their anthropologies give them no tools to handle the fact that chunks of their job they considered unique to them can now be done by what they call a "stochastic parrot."

[The Church has] been trying to get people to ask the question "What does it mean to be human?" for a very long time. Now a bunch of people are asking it unprompted. This lends itself to addressing the gaping hole in understanding what people should know about what it means to be human in a deeper way.

Catholics have a pretty good understanding of this. How do we bring that even more into dialogue with the tech world and the scientific world? 

Second, this technology is really good at producing deliverables and output. Unfortunately, the United States educational system has developed such that the only way we're really able to evaluate students is on the basis of output. This breaks the university model's back in terms of producing a value proposition for people purely from an economic standpoint.

Universities are for the formation of human persons. If you're well-formed, you generally do a better job in the workplace. But AI has accelerated the problem of explaining the university's value proposition when a degree doesn't automatically get you a job in the marketplace anymore, and it's apparent that a large chunk of entry-level knowledge worker jobs can be absorbed by these tools.

How do we reinvigorate the heart of what the university is – its human formation roots – while still providing the tools and training necessary from an entrepreneurial perspective to take this new economic paradigm in stride?

Third, it feels like we're in a moment where the laity is called to step up more. It's a great opportunity for us as the Church to help our leadership – our bishops, our priests – handle these technological and emerging technology waves better, both in terms of leveraging them and helping them bring ecclesial understanding to the pews in a different way.

DH: What difference does it make to have a distinctive Catholic voice in dialogue with the tech sector?

TB: First, there's really only one faith tradition that has the kind of authoritative structure driving towards a unified goal that can match the power of tech companies. Tech companies are powerful and massive because they have a single unified structure driving toward a more or less single unified goal.

There's also only one faith tradition that has the detail of human anthropology worked out to the minute degree that Catholicism does. Both of these facts ensure an anchor point for conversations that many different religious traditions should be involved in vis-à-vis big tech.

Second, there are a lot of Catholics, so we end up working in different companies and having perspectives from the global south to the global north. We take as a vital part of our faith that anybody can be part of it. As a result, the faith has to be able to dialogue with those different parts. It doesn't reduce the complexity of a question for an easier answer.

AI doesn't beget an easy answer. If we take Steve Jobs’ analogy of a computer being a bicycle for the human mind, AI gives us a motorcycle. It's going to be part and parcel of how we think of human flourishing, and raises a lot of questions.

This is why this needs an interdisciplinary perspective. I'm as interested in answers from the art department as I am from computer science, theology, and the nursing school.

Institute Structure and Operations

DH: What will the institute look like in terms of structure?

TB: I don't anticipate the institute getting very large from a human resources standpoint. The intent is to cross-list as many faculty as possible and get them involved with the institute, rather than erect an edifice for the institute itself. It’s worth noting that I will remain in my role at Microsoft.

We intend to operate entirely off new money brought into the University for purposes of the institute. We plan on having fellows, working with other universities across the globe, and working with graduate students.

I'm in the process of becoming a professor in the business school. This shouldn’t just be a non-teaching provost-office initiative, because I love teaching and want to really participate in the life of the campus.

DH: What do you have planned for convening faculty and staff?

TB: We're planning a colloquium for the fall to bring together people from across the university. It's intended to address how each of our disciplines can inform the dialogue about what AI is and how we should interact with it from a holistic perspective.

This colloquium will happen around the same time as one with industry leaders.

DH: Can you share any entrepreneurial experiments or opportunities you're considering bringing to the University?

TB: AI opens up fascinating fractional, passive income streams. Researchers or graduate students who are experts in certain areas can now have something like an agent that allows them to work with customers or clients outside the university, where their expertise is particularly useful. Before, the administrative overhead would only allow you to have a client or two. This new paradigm allows the administrative side to be managed pretty handily, so you only have to really provide your expertise.

I think there's also a whole entrepreneurial layer for the university in terms of technology commercialization. If you provide the right economic structures alongside the university, you could start a company and spin it out through a university-aligned mechanism. That company could pursue what companies do, with the university or university-adjacent entity owning part of that capitalization table and providing revenue back to where those ideas were generated.

Taylor Black serves as the inaugural director of Catholic University's new interdisciplinary institute for AI and emerging technologies while continuing his work at Microsoft. While he will remain in Seattle due to his diaconate formation and commitment, with his wife, as a foster parent and adoptive parent, he will travel regularly to campus.

For more information, contact [email protected].