The Questions AI Can't Answer
August 5, 2026
Welcome to the second entry in our series highlighting experts and how they are using Answers From Me to reach their audience. We hope you enjoy this expert spotlight (just in time for back to school!), and that it gives you some new ideas about how to share your own expertise!
Every August brings a new cohort, and this year every student arrives with AI in their pocket. This month we're featuring Maurício Manhães, professor of Service Design at SCAD. He teaches his students to stay above the average that AI produces, and his own AI.ssistant — yes, the period is intentional, and no, he won't budge — makes his guidance available around the clock.
“If you know nothing about a subject, GenAI lifts you to average fast. If you know a lot, it can just as easily pull you down to average. The question is no longer whether you'll work with GenAI. It's whether you'll stay above the average it produces.”
Here are three ways Maurício is putting that conviction to work this semester:
1. Teaching students to stay above average. In an experiment Maurício ran, 25 students co-created with AI. The AI missed every ambient cue in the room, and students absorbed in its fluent output missed them too. His coursework now trains exactly what AI can't replace: presence, opinion, and genuine agency.
2. Office hours that never close. Current students bring questions to his AI.ssistant at midnight, mid-project, and get answers grounded in Maurício's own thinking rather than generic AI. He sees where the cohort is stuck and starts class right there.
3. Answers for future students, before the first email. Prospective students ask his AI.ssistant the questions they'd hesitate to send a professor, like whether it's too late in their career for a master's, or whether a portfolio counts without the service design label. They get his real answers at any hour, from anywhere in the world.
Maurício's full expertise is now on Answers From Me. Here's what a professional weighing the leap might bring to Maurício's AI.ssistant:
Service Design with Maurício
Honestly? I'm a CX lead and AI is starting to do half my job. A master's feels like a big bet right now. Why would service design make me more employable, not less?
Because AI just made the average free — and no one gets hired for the average anymore. What organizations will pay for is what AI structurally cannot do:
- Read the room
- Build trust and commitment with real stakeholders across a live service
- Hold an opinion — a point of view that turns AI's baseline into something only you could have made
A service design degree doesn't compete with AI. It certifies you as the person who directs it — and who does everything it can't.
But I don't have a single project labeled “service design” in my portfolio…
Neither do most of our strongest applicants. Show me the moment a project fell apart and you reframed it. The stakeholders you connected who weren't talking. The pivot under pressure. That messy, human navigation of complexity — that is the portfolio. You've been playing the sport; you just learned a different name for it.
Are you “Scited” (scared and excited at the same time)?
You're in good company: in a recent study of 217 graduate students, nearly everyone reported both feelings about
AI at once: "This makes me faster" and "This might be making me weaker". That's not confusion.
That's an accurate read of the trade-off. Maurício's research on counterfeit agency is about
resolving it deliberately instead of drifting.
Ready to go further? Make that resolution your profession.
