ORC IAP Seminar 2026 Talk 1 Tinglong Dai
Tinglong Dai
Bernard T. Ferrari Professor
Johns Hopkins Carey Business School
Title
The Power Couple: Operations Research and Generative/Agentic AI
Abstract
Generative and agentic AI systems are rapidly reshaping workflows and norms across organizations and reviving a classic operations research challenge in a new form: how do we convert intelligence into reliable action at scale? This talk connects three frontiers on the road to autonomy.
First, generative AI can democratize optimization through language-to-decision workflows that enable interactive modeling, rapid what-if analysis, and continual re-optimization. Second, real-world impact depends on professional and organizational norms, including peer-reputation frictions in high-stakes settings, as well as incentive distortions and moral hazard in enterprise deployments. Third, as systems become more agentic, reliability becomes the binding constraint. Here, operations research plays a distinctive role by shifting from solving isolated instances to designing decision regimes: objectives, information structures, monitoring and verification, and fallback policies that keep autonomous systems stable, auditable, and safe under distribution shift and rare tail events.
Together, these ideas position OR not only as a user of AI, but as the discipline that enables and governs autonomy at scale. The talk also motivates the mission of the new AI in Operations department at Manufacturing & Service Operations Management.
Bio
Tinglong Dai is the Bernard T. Ferrari Professor at the Johns Hopkins Carey Business School, specializing in Operations Management and Business Analytics. He holds a joint faculty appointment at the Johns Hopkins School of Nursing. He is a member of the Johns Hopkins University Council and serves on the leadership team of the Hopkins Business of Health Initiative. He also co-leads the University’s Bloomberg Distinguished Professorship Cluster on Global Advances in Medical Artificial Intelligence. As a co-chair of the Johns Hopkins Workgroup on AI and Healthcare, his current work focuses on integrating AI into clinical workflows and improving productivity, access, and equity in healthcare delivery. He joined Carey in 2013 after receiving a PhD in Operations Management/Robotics from Carnegie Mellon University.
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