Noelle RussellChief Executive Officer, AI Leadership Institute · 5x Microsoft Trustworthy AI MVP | 3.4+ million students | #1 Thought Leader in Agentic AI | AI-Powered Revenue Growth + Cost Optimization Expert ✨Best-Selling Author: Scaling Responsible AI | TEDx Sp

𝐓𝐡𝐞 𝐒𝐤𝐢𝐥𝐥 𝐀𝐈 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐊𝐢𝐝𝐬 𝐁𝐨𝐭𝐡 𝐍𝐞𝐞𝐝 𝐭𝐨 𝐋𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐧

18 Feb 2026 · 1 min

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In this excerpt, the speaker introduces Tech Duels, a program that brings together people who rarely engage in debate—such as data scientists—and gives them structured problems to practice debating. The initiative was tested with adults and children. For adults, the experience proved valuable because it forced them to defend viewpoints they might not personally hold, revealing the cognitive effort required for perspective‑taking. For children, the program uncovered a nascent skill set: learning how to adopt a perspective, defend a claim, and provide warrants and grounding for that claim. The speaker draws a direct parallel between these debate competencies and the core tasks of building reliable AI models: a data scientist must locate sources, ground a model in those sources, and ensure the model does not produce falsehoods. The same principles apply to children as they mature and to new entrants into the workforce. The speaker concludes that there is significant opportunity to cultivate these skills across age groups, positioning them as essential for both human reasoning and trustworthy AI development.

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team. And I recently was working with a company called Tech Duels, and their mission was, hey, let's get people together that don't really speak, like, at all to humans— data scientists. Let's get those people together and let's give them a problem and teach them how to debate. And what we saw was that with adults, it was extremely valuable because people were like, oh, I now have to defend a perspective I actually don't believe in. What does that take? And with kids, We actually found that this is a skill I don't even think today that they're learning. Like, how do you take a perspective? How do you defend a claim? How do you provide warrant and truth and grounding? I mean, again, the exact same skills that are needed in an AI model and building a model as a data scientist. I need to find a source, ground the model in that source, and make sure it doesn't lie. The same thing is true for our kids as they grow up, right? And for people that are entering the workforce. So I think there's a lot of opportunity there.