Date: March 27, 2026
Speaker: Sumit Gulwani
Title: Telling AI How to Think and Talk – Leveraging Human Sciences
Abstract: Today's AI systems are increasingly powerful at following instructions. Yet there remains enormous untapped potential in guiding how they reason and communicate with humans. In this talk, I argue that the next leap in AI will come not from making models "think harder," but from teaching them to think with process and talk with purpose. Drawing inspiration from the human sciences, including cognitive science, social science, storytelling, and pedagogy, this talk presents practical design principles for building AI systems that reason more reliably, interact more cooperatively, and produce outputs that are more meaningful and aesthetic. Through stories from spreadsheets and image generation, from Flash Fill to modern agentic experiences, it illustrates ideas such as associative and metaphorical thinking, structured reflection before and after action, Gricean maxims of cooperative interaction, storytelling principles of framing and audience, and scaffolding divergent/convergent thinking for creative co-creation.
Bio: Sumit Gulwani is a Distinguished Scientist at Microsoft, where he connects ideas, connects people, and connects research with real-world practice. He is the inventor of Flash Fill, a popular AI feature in Excel that has also made its way into middle-school computing textbooks. Sumit leads the PROSE research and engineering team at Microsoft, advancing the frontiers of AI and embedding these innovations into Microsoft products, especially in the domains of software engineering and spreadsheet intelligence. A strong believer in the power of storytelling, he sponsors internal training programs at Microsoft to help technical teams communicate with greater clarity and impact. A passionate mentor, he also runs a thriving remote research fellowship program in India, nurturing young talent. His work has earned 15 research paper awards, the Max Planck-Humboldt Medal, ACM SIGPLAN Robin Milner Young Researcher Award, and Fellowships from ACM and AAIA. He received his PhD from UC Berkeley, where his dissertation was honored with the ACM SIGPLAN Outstanding Doctoral Dissertation Award. He earned his BTech from IIT Kanpur, where he was awarded the President's Gold Medal (2000) and later the Distinguished Alumnus Award (2024).