there was a group of about 50 or so students that I had to talk to about my job. my path of least resistance for sparking their interest was to briefly go over AI. 100% of the students I talked to were being taught AI or had already been taught how to use it during their education. with this in mind, I prioritized showing a real-world example of how AI benefits me and my team, and I also decided to focus more on helping them develop a better sense of how and when to delegate to AI. by demonstrating how an MCP server works, each student seemed to immediately understand the benefits of deterministic retrieval when i was able to demonstrate live how easily government data can be accessed using an API.
one of my favorite moments about this talk was hearing students outright admit exactly what they use ai for: doing the work for them. rather than outright dismiss this, i asked the students to consider using the ai to assist them with learning how to do the work in the first place. this then allows them to understand, analyze, and validate their results.