Harvard Is the Map. TikTok Is Waze.

Donny F. Lauderback President F2OnSite

I've taken a ridiculous number of AI courses

over the last couple of years. Harvard Business School, Wharton, Vanderbilt, and a stack of others. Certifications, lectures, modules, notes, assignments …I've done the work to try and stay current.

Here's the honest truth: a lot of what I learned is already outdated.

That's not a knock on the schools. Some of those courses were excellent. Harvard gave me structure. Wharton gave me the business lens. Vanderbilt gave me some of the best practical prompt-engineering training I've seen. They handed me vocabulary, frameworks, and a way to think about where AI fits into strategy, operations, and leadership. That matters, and I'd take them again.

But AI moves faster than any university can. By the time a school designs a course, approves it, records it, edits it, and ships it, the ground has already shifted. The tool they demoed in week one looks different by week six. The "cutting-edge" prompt technique is table stakes by the time you print the certificate. The shiny new feature they referenced got renamed, copied, absorbed, or quietly killed.

That's not a university problem. That's a 'Speed of Change 'problem

And the cleanest way I know to explain it is this:

Harvard is the map. TikTok is Waze.

The serious institutions give you the map. They teach the terrain, the fundamentals, how to think, where AI fits into business and society. You need that. A map matters. But if you're driving through a city where the roads change every single day, the map isn't enough. You need Waze. You need someone telling you there's a wreck ahead, a road just closed, a shortcut that opened this morning. That's short-form. That's TikTok, Instagram, YouTube, and LinkedIn — the people publishing every day at the speed AI actually moves.

Now here's the part that's harder to say out loud, so I'll just say it.

I think I've learned more about actually using AI from short-form video than from my entire wall of certificates.

That's a strange sentence coming from a guy who loves HBS. But it's true. The certificates taught me how to think about AI. Short-form taught me how to do something with it on a Tuesday afternoon. There's a difference, and most people haven't caught up to how big that difference has gotten.

Is there junk on TikTok? Of course. Fake experts. People overhyping every release like it's going to replace your whole team by Friday. People selling shortcuts who've never actually built anything. And of course, TikTok is massively geared towards entertainment, whether it's dancing pandas or a guy playing the piano with his feet. With AI content, you have to use judgment  same as you would walking a job site or reading a vendor proposal.

But buried in that noise are some genuinely sharp people who use these tools every day. They test them, break them, build with them, and show you the real workflow instead of the theory. They're moving at the same speed the technology is. That's the whole point.

A few I keep coming back to:

Catherine Goetze CatGPT. 

Catherine Goetz aka "CatGPT"

Cat makes AI feel human instead of intimidating. No textbook voice, no jargon wall. She takes complicated ideas and makes a normal person feel like they can actually use this stuff. That's a different job than a university is built to do, and a lot of people need exactly that before they'll even start.

Meghana Dhar “The Tea in Tech”

Meghanda Dhar "Tea in Tech"

Meghana explains the conversation around the technology with the business and Silicon Valley angle, and makes inside-baseball tech talk digestible for people outside the bubble. AI isn't just a tool conversation anymore. It's a business, workforce, and leadership conversation, and most owners don't have time to read twenty reports to find the signal. She finds it for you.

Mariah Brunner. “itsmariahbrunner”

Mariah lives on the build-it-and-use-it side. Not "look at this cool tool", she’s more like "here's how I'd actually run work, business,

Mariah Brunner AI & Tech

and life with this." Most people collect AI tips and never touch them. They save the video and tell themselves they'll come back later. Then nothing happens. Mariah's whole thing is implementation, which is where AI stops being entertainment and starts being leverage.

She says it best:

@itsmariahbrunner: "That's exactly what I'm trying to show with every video: not the theory of AI, but how I specifically use it in my work and my life, so someone watching can take that and use it for their own. I post about 10-15 videos a week for that reason. And I back it with a private AI community so people can get those reps in together instead of alone. Short form is becoming the fastest way people actually learn to use AI, because the tools change too quickly for a textbook to ever keep up."

Nate B. Jones "nate.b.jones"

 Nate comes at it from product and strategy. He's not chasing every

shiny object, he slows the conversation down just enough to ask better questions. Nate is methodical and has an easy going way of explaining even the most complext AI processes. His TikTok account rivals Catherine (CatGPT) and his followers consistently learn the more complext and next level AI skills in just 90-120 seconds typically although some of his content is longer, but worth the extra time! Nate covers questions we need to know answers to, such as "What actually changed here?" "Is this a real shift or just a good demo?" "What should a business leader pay attention to, and what's safe to ignore?" That clear-headed read is rare in a space that runs on hype.

THIS IS THE WAZE of AI

and this is the real-time layer telling you what's happening on the road right now. The Waze is TikTok, Instagram and YouTube short form content. That's where people actually learn.

And here's where I land it, because at F2OnSite I don't care about AI as a buzzword. I care about one thing: does it make the business better?

Can it help the sales team? Recruiting? Project management? Can it write a better first draft, summarize faster, train people quicker, or flag a problem before it becomes a fire? That's the test. Not whether the tool is trendy. Not whether someone made a viral video about it. Not whether a university put it in a syllabus. Does it work, does it save time, does it improve quality? 

If AI can remove 90% of someone’s repetitive tasks, can we turn that newly freed-up bandwidth into another full employee’s worth of value?

You can't answer that by watching someone else use AI. At some point you have to open the tool yourself, write the prompt, build the workflow, and find out where it saves you an hour and where it falls apart. The certificate is the map. The creators are Waze. But execution is the steering wheel, and nobody can hold it for you.

So no, I'm not anti-university, in fact I am taking more courses now and will continue to. Serious courses teach me how to think. But I'll keep watching the creators too, because they're moving faster than any institution can, and I'm not interested in being six months behind on something this important.

If you're a business owner still dismissing TikTok and short-form as kids dancing on their phones, I'd reconsider that fast. Some of the best, most current, most practical AI education available right now is sitting in a 90-second video made by someone who used the tool this morning. Go follow a few of the people above. Watch how they actually work. Then go build something.

The future of learning isn't Harvard or TikTok. It's both, but don't let anyone tell you the MAP is the part that matters most. In a city where the roads change every day, WAZE is what gets you home.