Tarun Sood ’23

Tarun Sood plays a leading role in data, analytics and Artificial Intelligence — not just at American Century Investments, where he serves as Chief Data and AI officer, but also across multiple advisory boards, including Harvard Business Review and the AIM Councils, an organization supporting senior executives in AI.

He turned to LeBow’s Doctorate of Business Administration (DBA) program to elevate his game. “I am just maniacally passionate about professional growth, and I also wanted to add research depth to my profile,” he says. “I wanted to know how to set up a study, and how to conduct it from end-to-end.”

With its focus on applying the scientific method and academic-style research to real-world business problems, the DBA program gave him that, and much more.

“It was definitely an eye-opener, because the academic and professional literature — both on leadership and on different transformations — is very different,” he says.

Right now, a lot of that academic literature is focused on the impacts of AI, something Sood wrangles with every day. “Academic researchers are writing some interesting pieces about how AI transformation is disrupting the workforce,” he says. In his own course of study, he dove deep into that area, “and now I can connect those two dots very quickly.”

The program also spoke to Sood’s deep commitment to servant leadership. “How do you become a better leader? When I read all of the literature on this, as part of my research at LeBow, it really opened my eyes and made me think about how I can take these principles and apply them to developing people,” he says. “I provide mentorship to various leaders at different levels, and all of that is very transferable to what I currently do.”

Among his doctoral coursework, Sood pointed to a quantitative strategies course with Provost Distinguished Research Professor and DBA Academic Director David Gefen, PhD, and professor of MIS, as particularly impactful, as well as working on qualitative research — something he calls a personal “blind spot” — with Rajiv Nag, PhD, clinical professor of management.

With quantitative studies, “you’re trying to prove a hypothesis using data,” he says, while qualitative research is more human-focused. “The methodology is very different. You’re interviewing your different team members, and your interviews will either validate your hypothesis, or cause you to change it.”

All this feeds into Sood’s passion for helping others. He does that not just in his professional and board work, but also at LeBow, where he serves on the advisory council for the Center for Applied AI and Business Analytics.

Looking ahead, he says, the combined skills he acquired at LeBow will help him take that commitment to service even further.

“As I look at other people trying to address similar challenges, I’m thinking about how I can help mentor and grow them,” he says. The doctorate “just opens more doors: I can keep moving forward with research, publishing reports and sharing knowledge at conferences, and I can teach the next generation about how to build a career in data, in AI or in leadership.”