Skeptical by Design

How many of us have actually met all of our colleagues? In today's corporate landscape, many of them exist in entirely different time zones and cultural contexts. And while we come together to do the same daily tasks, the simple truth is that we exist in our locational bubbles of operation. The employees spread across the world within a given global corporation face the same regulatory questions within their respective scopes of development, but lack a real sense of how their international counterparts are navigating their own regulatory environment.

For most, that is labeled a communication problem. For Moiz Shirazi, AB '00, MBA '07, this is a data goldmine ready to be excavated, examined, and spun into a new golden era of enhanced workflow. 

Shirazi spent the better part of a decade watching organizations grapple with a stalemate: an abundance of knowledge without the meaningful processes to alchemize it into tangible change.  Bound by precedent, siloed teams, and institutional knowledge that departs with employees who move on to new roles, Shirazi is determined to break into the lifespring of untapped potential defined by the cumulative memory of an organization and its parts. The insight behind the foundation of Shirazi’s company, SCOREalytics, was simple but easy to miss: the bottleneck to enhanced performance is not expertise, but access to it. 

As AI becomes more and more prevalent, firms are racing against each other and rethinking how their internal operations act as data that can be used to tackle inefficiencies in innovative ways. Shirizi, however, is running a different race altogether.

SCOREAlytics was born a little over a year ago with a more collaborative approach to harnessing information to improve workflows. The company uses AI to compile trade, data privacy, employment law, intellectual property, tax legislation, and other external factors into a comprehensive, actionable database of legal risks. "Timeliness of the data, reliability of the data, and making data actionable are what's missing in the connection between an idea and its execution," Shirazi explains. “SCOREAlytics exists to help bridge that gap”.

A product of both the College and Chicago Booth, Shirazi draws a direct line between the way he was taught to think in his classes and the way he now builds for impact. Thinking outside the box, he says, is key, a practice that is ingrained in the Booth class structure, and one that has taken him where he is today.

Pieces of the Data Pie

The entry point for this entrepreneurial journey was the legal industry, one flush with information that nobody had quite figured out how to use. Legal developments, regulatory changes, and policy shifts are data-rich and yet wholly underused as resources for informed decision-making, and what Shirazi observed was that the problem ran deeper than the industry level. Individual teams learn effectively from their own experiences, but that learning rarely travels beyond the team itself. A company spanning three continents has three separate institutional memories that almost never speak to each other. 

SCOREalytics was built on that observation, distinguishing itself through its emphasis on external data to complete the internal puzzles firms are already trying to solve. As Shirazi puts it: "Think of it as pie—other platforms have their slices, focused on organizing and analyzing what's already happening inside their company. SCOREalytics brings the last slice to complete the picture."

At the foundation of all of it is a Booth education that shaped not just what he knows, but fundamentally how he thinks. He reflects on entrepreneurial and finance courses less for their content and more for the habit of mind they built: always look at a problem as an opportunity to ask whether it can be done better. That instinct to question the status quo is what drove him to see a data problem where others saw a people problem, and it is the mindset behind one of SCOREalytics' most provocative solutions yet: antagonist agents. 

Skeptical by design—much like a UChicago student—these AI agents challenge the outputs of the standard agent, refusing to let bias go unchecked. With the understanding that AI is inherently trained to please the user, Shirazi argues that accepting its output at face value eventually teaches the user to stop questioning altogether, eroding a critical skillset. And that, for a UChicago alum, is the real danger.

It's a principle he applies to his company, and one he'd extend to anyone entering the workforce right now.

Navigating the Gaps

There is a level of entrepreneurial equipment built into the foundation of a Booth education. The question becomes how to use it, and right now—in an age where the AI landscape is shifting faster than most institutions can keep up—is exactly the right time to try.

Shirazi sees the current moment as an opening for those entering the workplace. There is a gap between companies adopting AI and actually deploying it at scale and that gap, much like the gap between having information and knowing how to use it, is an entry point for those who are paying enough attention. For students preparing to step into that space, he offers three principles he believes make that gap easier to navigate.

The first is to be good at more than one thing. As AI raises the floor of access to information across every industry, it's not enough to be just a finance person or just a good lawyer. The baseline differentiator is changing. What sets someone apart is now a genuine understanding of what AI can and cannot do and the ability to use it to create new approaches rather than just accelerate old ones. 

The second is that the goal is not to fill a role, but to transform it. Shirazi is direct about this: we have moved past the point where doing a job the way it has always been done is a reasonable long-term strategy. The world is changing; we have a responsibility to keep up. Future leaders are those who approach a role with the intention of figuring out where AI—its newness and growing potential—fits into their role in a meaningful way.

The third, perhaps the most grounded in his Booth roots, is that the antagonist agent is a mindset before it is a product. Question everything, challenge everything. The same instinct behind the antagonistic AI agents Shirazi is building at SCOREalytics is available to anyone willing to use it. You can already prompt the AI tools you use daily to push back on their own answers. Ask one what assumptions it made that could be wrong, see what happens. Critical engagement with AI, and with problem-solving more generally, is what drives real innovation.

As AI becomes increasingly woven into the Booth curriculum through new courses and research, the opportunity to build an essential AI fluency is there. But fluency alone is not enough. Shirazi found his gap in data, between what firms knew and what they were actually using, between information and action. While SCOREalytics is his answer to it, the gap itself is not unique to him. They are everywhere, in every industry, hiding in plain sight inside questions that people have stopped—or haven't started—asking. 

Although years have passed since Shirazi was seated in a classroom, he acknowledges that in the age of AI, the most powerful thing you can bring to the table is still a willingness to think differently about something everyone else may have accepted as fixed or true. That mindset, more than any tool or credential, is what Moiz Shirazi would advise students to carry into every room. It's the mindset, a decade later, that he is still building his company around.