Movement Toward Change

For as long as I can remember, the urge to create change through movement has been a core motivator of mine. Ten years of ballet challenged me to experience movement in its most literal forms, and I have translated that passion into my academic and professional lives. Working with innovation during the past eight years has taught me that what creates change is the courage to push something from where it is to where it could be. We create movement by imagining a different world and then applying actual motion to start new things. I arrived at Booth understanding my work this way, as a motion toward change. The last two years have taught me that artificial intelligence is one of the most powerful instruments for the movement I so desire to create.

I did not expect to learn that here. I came in assuming AI would be a subject, something to study, analyze, and frame neatly on a slide. It turned out to be the opposite. AI behaves more like an instrument than a subject, and you only understand an instrument and its potential by using it to build something real. Two years of using it in different forms and shapes have changed what I believe I am now capable of building.

This realization started in the classroom, where my ideas where turned to real practice. In the course Application Development, I built a working ticket exchange platform for Booth students, the first time I carried something from idea to a functioning product I had developed myself. In Building an AI Company, I stopped treating AI as a feature to add and started treating it as a foundation to build on, directly aligning it with a business problem to solve. Two professors, Raghu Betina and Carlos Ganoza, became mentors who gave me the confidence to become an AI practitioner. 

What surprised me was how familiar the work felt. Building with AI asked for the same instincts dance did: commit to a direction, feel where it resists, adjust, try again. I experimented with a blend of structure and improvisation that stopped being opposites and became a mental model that helps me drive creativity and create useful products. The discipline I learned in ballet, the attention to rhythm, timing, and form, turned out to be the discipline a good AI practice demands. And those constraints were what made real creativity possible in the first place.

Once I felt that, I wanted other people to feel it too, so I began co-designing a hands-on prototyping workshop series with Professor André Marques, Adjunct Associate Professor in the Department of Computer Science. The premise was simple: Booth students should leave each session having made something real. It also connected Booth to the wider University, a depth of technical talent business students rarely reach for. This gave us permission to explore, learn what is made possible with, and have someone guide us as we tried to implement the learnings in a very practical way.

AI also changed my relationship with not knowing. Before, reaching the edge of my technical ability meant stopping or handing the problem to someone else. Now, the edge is simply a starting point. I can ask, attempt, and inspect my way toward something that works, and learn the underlying idea in the process rather than around it. This is the shift I think business schools still underrate. AI not only makes experts faster; it lets non-experts begin, and beginning is most of what stops people.

During my MBA, I started to build Mida, an AI-native fintech idea I developed during my classes and in my free time. I learned that I could take it surprisingly far on my own, far past what I would have believed two years earlier. When I hit a ceiling, a specific technical limit where my capability ran out, and the problem genuinely required expertise I did not have. What I found in that moment was that the Booth community had the resources to keep me going. 

In an AI Prototyping Bootcamp led by a Booth alumnus, and I had an opportunity to keep working on my idea with a mentor to guide me through the technical aspects I was unfamiliar with. That ceiling showed me where independent building ends and specialized knowledge begins, how much of good judgment is knowing what a problem actually needs, and where to find the people who fill the gap. AI pushed that line outward and made seeing it clearly matter more than ever. I never would have known this if I hadn’t experimented with the tool in the first place, and it taught me a valuable lesson on having an open mind when it came to trying and failing with AI.

Where human expertise and AI capability meet is exactly what I am moving toward next. As I relocate to San Francisco to join Handshake AI as a Strategic Projects Lead, I will be connecting expert minds to the frontier labs training the next generation of models. For two years, I built with AI. Now I get to shape what AI learns, and from whom. 

I am taking all the learnings from Booth to implement in my new challenge and to continue doing what I have been doing for the past years: creating movement in the world. What stays constant is the conviction underneath all of it: that change is something you create by moving toward it, deliberately, and usually alongside other people. Booth did not teach me to think about AI. It gave me the tools, the mentors, and the permission to move with it. That, more than any framework I could put on a slide, is what I am carrying into what comes next.

Lorena Prates is a part if the Center for Applied AI's Fellowship Program.