Acknowledgments

A book of this scope is inherently collaborative, even when a single name appears on the cover.

My deepest gratitude to the business leaders, data scientists, engineers, ethicists, regulators, and students whose experiences, challenges, and insights shaped every chapter. While the characters and organizations in this book are fictional, the problems they face are drawn from real conversations with real people who trusted me enough to share their failures alongside their successes.

To the AI practitioners who reviewed technical chapters for accuracy — your corrections saved me from several embarrassing errors and one genuinely dangerous recommendation. Any remaining mistakes are entirely my own.

To the policy experts who ensured the regulatory chapters reflected the law as it is, not as I wished it to be — thank you for your precision and your patience with my tendency to oversimplify.

To my MBA students, past and present — you are the reason this book exists. Your questions pushed me to explain more clearly, your skepticism kept me honest, and your ambition reminded me why this subject matters. Special thanks to those who piloted early drafts and provided the kind of blunt feedback that only students can deliver.

To the research assistants who tracked down hundreds of citations, verified statistics, and tested every code example on fresh machines — your thoroughness is the invisible infrastructure of this book.

To the editorial team — your structural instincts transformed a sprawling manuscript into something that actually teaches. The book is better in every way for your involvement.

To my colleagues in business schools around the world who are wrestling with the same pedagogical challenge — how to teach AI to future business leaders — thank you for the conversations, the shared syllabi, and the willingness to admit that none of us has figured this out completely.

To the open-source community — the tools used throughout this book (Python, pandas, scikit-learn, Jupyter, and many others) represent thousands of hours of unpaid labor by people who believed that knowledge tools should be accessible. This book stands on their shoulders.

And to my family — who endured yet another book project with grace, humor, and only occasional eye-rolling — thank you for everything that matters most.