Mitch Gross, MPP’98, on Understanding Data-Driven Information and Adapting to New Technology

Before attending the Harris School of Public Policy, Mitch Gross, MPP’98, spent years “running away from math.” During the long international career that followed his time at Harris, he came to embrace it, serving as a managing director at Accenture everywhere from India to Brazil, helping create a working class in the Philippines, working as an angel investor with AI companies, and specializing as a graduate student mentor at UChicago. He currently serves as CEO of PointWest, a Manila-based technology services company. 

Is it true that what attracted you to the Harris School was the Chicago weather?  

I’d love to tell you that I was drawn more to the intellectual offerings of Chicago and the quality of the program. While obviously that was important, I was very superficially swayed by this picture that I saw of the Quad in the middle of winter. I grew up in Miami, and frankly, I couldn’t wait to find a place that had snow. 

Did you have a vision for your future? 

Sometimes I scratched my head and wondered: How am I going to apply calculus to the real world? At UChicago, the reality is that everybody speaks the same language, and that’s mathematics. It was pretty intimidating that I couldn’t speak the language. That forced me outside my comfort zone. I wanted a combination of experiences inside and outside the classroom that would help me move to where I wanted to in my career. So even before I arrived, I lined up an internship with then-US Senator Carol Moseley Braun, JD’72. From there I spent a lot of time in internships at the Federal Trade Commission and Salomon Smith Barney.  

How did it dovetail with your Harris education? 

It was through these outside experiences that I had opportunities to test-drive what I was learning. So many folks in the business and policy world were making decisions based on things other than data. Or they simply accepted data without understanding it. There was a very clear gap—and it was an area of opportunity for someone like me. And it helped me more fully appreciate the value proposition of the Harris School education. 

Is the world waking up to the importance of data-driven information? 

We’re at the beginning stages of the evolution where there at least is now an emerging common understanding of the role that data must play in today’s world – but we have a long way to go. Folks have to start to really develop that skill set that is required. It wasn’t that long ago that we learned Microsoft was using AI and generating fake news articles. Microsoft invests probably more than any other company in AI, and yet they too had something that was faulty. But because people saw it from a trusted source, they assumed it was true. Some of the startups that I worked with focused on developing synthetic voices or synthetic skins. Essentially what that means is that I just need about two seconds of your voice, and I can make you say literally anything.  

So what do we do about this? 

We have to be smart. You can’t always trust the data. That’s where Harris equipped me. When you’re building a model, what has that model built off of? How has it been tested? And that’s key for people to read data critically. The reality with AI is that it doesn’t know; that’s why it’s called artificial. It could turn around sources that appear to be real, but they’re not, simply because an algorithm doesn’t yet have enough information to predict correctly. 

Maybe we have to start with just explaining the basics of how this works—in a way that doesn’t unnecessarily alarm people. Because that’s also something that we’re turning towards: creating such mass panic that you may not trust anything. We live in a world where increasingly there are people who just flat-out don’t trust anything.  

What are the implications for future generations? 

My son considered Alexa to be a buddy of his because every night Alexa would read a story, and now we’ve progressed it to the point where we’re using generative AI for storytelling at night. He loves soccer and he loves Dr. Seuss, so I could say, “Generate a very simple bedtime story using a Dr. Seuss style of writing about a soccer player named Maddy who’s the hero and wins the game.” And in a second or two, we have the story. He’s growing up accustomed to it. But he also needs to be taught that not everything that’s generated is correct. It has to be viewed as supporting something versus replacing it.  

How are policymakers keeping up? 

We need to adapt another language, which is technology. Because the reality is our policymakers are a step behind. They’re not well-positioned to regulate what they don’t understand. And the consequence is either we’re overregulating and stifling that innovation or underregulating and allowing these bad actors to have free rein. It’s difficult because this evolves so quickly. Nobody was talking about mainstream generative AI a year ago. We’ve got to understand it and to think about the implications.  

What’s your legacy from your 20 years at Accenture?  

There are Accenture leaders that I hired as they were starting their careers, and now they are mentoring their people. That’s the enduring legacy that all of us have a responsibility to create. And one of the things that I’m the proudest about is we helped contribute to the build-out of a middle class here in the Philippines. When I came here, there were just the haves and the have-nots. And when I was launching our first business, this was with the healthcare business, we hired people who were the first in their families to go to college. I helped create 10,000-plus jobs for people that are now in the middle class, and they now own cars and apartments.  

How does this affect us in America? 

We live in this big world, and what happens in one part affects the other. Look at the current migration crisis in the U.S. If there was more income equality around the world, then we wouldn’t have people feel like they’ve got to risk their lives and walk thousands of miles through a jungle and cross rivers to find a better life.  

How do you support companies who haven’t benefited from formal business training?   

One of the companies that I’m working with was started by an Indian couple that I worked with for years when I was at Accenture. They’re data scientists and they launched a company focused around creating analytic use cases for specific industries. They saw an opportunity but they didn’t have the right training, so they weren’t able to attract any real investment dollars. I’ve help them grow and stitch together a set of ecosystem partnerships that they’re using to go to market. Now they have larger clients based in the U.S. And it’s not that I came in to be the knight in shining armor. They had the talent. My role was as an outsider, helping them to see that they don’t need to constrain themselves the way that they were in the past. 

What common mistakes do companies make?   

There’s a tendency to be seduced by the shiny object without taking the time to learn and understand. At Accenture, I launched a global intelligent automation business, and at the time it was very focused on robotic process automation. What I found was that companies were littered with these pilots or proofs of concept that never went anywhere. They didn’t think about whether it was scalable, whether you could commercialize it. People want the new, but they also are risk averse. And you can’t have it both ways. We live in a world where you can’t be incremental. You’re either going to be highly disruptive, or you’re going to be disrupted yourself and you’re going to become replaced. 

What do you like to do when you’re not being highly disruptive?   

I love soccer. My son plays it, we love watching it, we love playing it. And my wife and I absolutely love travel. I’ve been to 45 countries, and we’re always thinking about where we want to go next. And I’m not embarrassed to admit that I love reality TV.  

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