A New Kind of Education

Building a novel curriculum at the intersection of business and technology.

Strategic ML was created in response to a challenge: our founders, Phil and Sam, were asked to teach a one-week course on AI Strategy for the senior leadership of a large multinational corporation. Many of the students had very limited technical skills—our goal was to give every attendee the knowledge they needed to deploy AI/ML tools effectively in their particular role.

With only one week to work with (and only a few hours of class time each day), we had to fundamentally reimagine how a highly technical curriculum should be constructed. There was no time to teach our students linear algebra theorems or quiz them on the minutia of Python syntax. So we took the standard pyramid model of course progression and refined it through painstaking iteration, so that every level gives students exactly what they need to progress to the next level.

Many courses on technical subjects waste a tremendous amount of the learner's time through poor curriculum design: the example code in many machine learning courses uses unnecessarily convoluted Python-language features, such as list comprehensions. Consequently, a student will have to do a separate lesson on list comprehensions before they can even start studying AI/ML. In response to these problems, every aspect of our lessons has been designed for maximum simplicity. Our code examples use the simplest possible syntax, while still giving the student hands-on experience with state-of-the-art algorithms.