Inside Stanford GSB's AI Club: How One Student Turned Community into a Career
By Laura Nelson
Before Xaviera Ho came to Stanford GSB, she had built a career in finance – starting with JPMorgan, then moving into Private Equity. Similar to many MBAs, she came to the GSB to pivot careers: "I wanted to be in the AI space. I wanted to pivot into an AI startup as an operator," she told me.
Just before graduation, Xaviera recently accepted an offer to join a Series D- AI startup leading Growth and Strategic Partnerships., which is exactly the type of position she’d targeted when she started. Her experience at Stanford was critical for making this transition, particularly in her capacity as the co-president of the Artificial Intelligence (AI) Club. “I don't know if I could have done that if I didn't go to GSB, if I weren't involved in the AI club,” she says.
AI and GSB
Stanford GSB's AI Club is one of the largest student-run organization on campus, reflecting just how essential AI knowledge and fluency have become to the GSB student experience and post-MBA careers.
Of course, the school has an advantage that most MBA programs can’t replicate: close proximity to the Bay Area’s ecosystem, particularly the heart of new AI developments. Startups want to recruit at GSB, founders want to play a part, and alums are engaged.
At the school level, AI@GSB is a dean’s initiative that launched last year, which empowers every GSB student with a personal toolkit of skills, frameworks, and practices to integrate AI into any business context. This ensures that students graduate with a foundation of AI fluency and tech literacy – regardless of their career paths.
The four pillars of the AI Club
Xaviera discussed four pillars that define how the club operates and supports its members. These include:
Fireside chats and brownbag lunches (BBLs) – Regular, closed-door sessions where founders and senior leaders at AI-native companies visit campus to share what's actually happening at their organizations. The club has hosted founders and leaders from companies like OpenAI, Mercor, Manus AI, Nvidia, Genspark, Goodfire, Starcloud and Inception Labs, among others. Students can chat with speakers afterward and make direct connections, too. Xaviera knows of at least one MBA1 who landed a summer internship from a January fireside chat.
Career treks to AI companies – Small groups – typically 8-10 students – travel to San Francisco to visit AI companies in person. They tour the office, meet senior leaders, and connect with GSB alumni already working there. For example, Xaviera visited Scale AI, and another trek to C3.ai offered additional perspective into enterprise AI.
The annual AI conference – This is the flagship event of the club, and more than 400 students attend. It features keynotes from prominent figures in AI, and this year's conference hosted Vinod Khosla (Khosla Ventures) as a headline speaker, Ashwin Sreenivas (co-founder of Decagon), career panels, and a post-conference networking session where 12-15 AI companies came specifically to hire. One of Xaviera's co-leaders landed his summer internship from that networking session.
Small group dinners – These dinners are a bit more intimate than the conference and unite students interested in specific areas of AI – for example, frontier labs, AI apps, infrastructure and inference – to build relationships and think together. “It's more like community building,”Xaviera explains, “and then thinking about, 'Oh, you're interested in this field,' and then just jamming.”
AI fluency isn’t just for tech candidates
The AI Club isn’t just for students pursuing tech careers. It also supports those pursuing more traditional MBA paths, like consulting and banking.
For example, consultants are coming to the club to understand how to advise clients on AI implementation in enterprises with legacy systems and databases. Xaviera says that “They're coming from more of an 'applied AI' perspective.” While they’re not building models, they’re leading AI transformation initiatives in existing organizations.
Also, investment banking is due for disruption. One of Xaviera's classmates interned at Rogo, an AI agent platform purpose-built for high finance that recently closed a $160 million Series D round at a reported $2B valuation. AI tools are coming for the industry, and the students who understand them will most certainly have an advantage.
We also talked about a few other opportunity areas, including manufacturing and healthcare. Xaviera points out that “A lot of AI has been talked about in the software space, but there's a huge industry out there that is touching the physical real economy,” she says. Supply chain, logistics, and operations are all areas for transformation, and not a traditional draw for MBA candidates. Healthcare is yet another frontier, with AI applications in drug discovery and clinical trials attracting serious attention.
There's also ETA – entrepreneurship through acquisition. Xaviera noted that a professor at GSB has been teaching students how to incorporate AI into the search fund process itself, and how to think about AI transformation (or even AI rollups) once a company is acquired. AI is no longer a vertical, really – it touches every career path coming out of an MBA program.
What are GSB students building?
A strong indicator of where GSB students are on AI isn't in the curriculum – it's in the WhatsApp groups. “There are people who are definitely ahead of the curve,” Xaviera says. “They've got multiple OpenClaw agents running, and these people in turn teach their classmates. It's very much a grassroots initiative.”
The week OpenClaw was released and gained traction, two students ran workshops teaching their classmates how to install it. Someone built an AI agent integrated with the Canvas API to programmatically ingest course materials, parse assignments and deadlines, and automate reminder generation, then synced these outputs into a personal task management system
Xaviera built a recruiting agent for herself that identifies recently-funded AI startups, filters for companies that match her interests, and surfaces relevant roles. She shared the Github repository on LinkedIn, and her classmates and MBA candidates from other schools are using it. She then presented it to the career management center, too.
“The experience is what you make of it. The opportunities are there – it's whether you want to grab it.”
What should MBA students ask when evaluating programs?
Xaviera's experience reveals something that every applicant researching MBA programs should consider: what does a school's AI infrastructure look like beyond the marketing and website?
GSB is leading the charge with its school-wide initiative, curriculum, and a student body that is highly engaged. For those who are interested in pursuing an MBA and just starting the process, here are some key questions to ask:
How does AI show up across the curriculum? Is AI fluency integrated in core subjects or are AI topics offered as electives?
How does the career management center think about AI in the job search process?
How are students developing AI fluency? Are they teaching each other, building things, and sharing them?
How are alums engaged in AI development? Are they coming back to recruit?
The tools are available, but what separates these programs is how the community uses them, iterates, and shares. As Xaviera's story shows, your MBA experience is defined by what you help build. It helps enormously when the program, the community, and the alumni are all pulling in the same direction.