AI at Your Side
The Student’s Guide to Smarter Learning
by Sebastian Galiani and Raul A. Sosa
Artificial intelligence has arrived in every part of student life, yet most students use only a fraction of what it offers, and many rely on it in ways that quietly weaken the very abilities they came to university to build. AI at Your Side is written for the student who wants the opposite: to think more clearly, learn more deeply, and do more ambitious work with AI as a partner rather than a crutch.
Its argument is simple and consistent. Artificial intelligence should augment human intelligence, not replace it. Used carelessly, AI lets a student produce polished work while understanding very little. Used well, it lets that same student learn faster, get feedback sooner, and concentrate effort on the parts of intellectual life that matter most. The difference is not the tool but the way of working, and that is what this book teaches.
At its center is a practical idea the authors call a harness: a set of rules, routines, and constraints that keep an AI model focused, honest about what it does not know, and accountable to the reasoning it is meant to serve. Chapter by chapter, the book builds discipline-specific harnesses for the real work students do, from ideation, research, and academic writing to mathematics, coding, data analysis, economics, and finance.
Written by a senior research economist who has taught AI-integrated university courses and a member of the first generation educated alongside generative AI, the book is grounded in learning science and trains a single durable habit of mind: to ask what is missing, which assumption is doing the work, and what would change if it no longer held. Throughout, the goal is intellectual ownership, so that whatever you produce with AI at your side, the thinking remains unmistakably yours.
About the Authors
Sebastian Galiani is the Weatherhead Presidential Chair in Economics at Tulane University. He holds a PhD from the University of Oxford and is an NBER and BREAD fellow. He was Secretary of Economic Policy and Deputy Minister at Argentina’s Ministry of Treasury (2017–2018). His research has appeared in journals such as the American Economic Review, the Journal of Political Economy, and the Quarterly Journal of Economics, and has been featured in outlets including Science, The New York Times, and The Economist. He has advised the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, the Gates Foundation, and the United Nations.
Raul A. Sosa is a predoctoral researcher in the Department of Economics at Universidad de San Andrés. He holds an M.A. in Economics from Universidad de San Andrés and a B.A. from Universidad Nacional de Tucumán. His research centers on artificial intelligence in economics, both applying it to empirical work and developing new AI-based tools and methods for research. He also works on the study of demographic dynamics and public policy.