2026 Best 40-Under-40 Business Professors: Daniel Guetta, Columbia Business School

Daniel Guetta
Columbia Business School

“As an MBAxMS dual degree student, taking Professor Guetta’s Business Analytics II and III courses was the absolute highlight of my academic journey at Columbia Business School. He possesses a rare talent for bridging the gap between complex data science and real-world business applications, but what truly sets him apart is his profound dedication to his students. In a massive elective class of over 150 students, he creates an incredibly intimate learning environment. He is the kind of educator who remembers a student’s face, active participation, and even their professional background. When a student demonstrates true passion and dedication, he becomes their fiercest advocate, always willing to go the extra mile to ensure their hard work is recognized. Professor Guetta is not just teaching analytics; he is empowering the next generation of tech-literate business leaders. He is undeniably one of the most impactful, empathetic, and inspiring educators I have ever met.” – Hyungmin Jun

Daniel Guetta, 39, is a Professor of Professional Practice at Columbia Business School, Faculty Director of the MBAxMS program (CBS’s joint program with the Engineering school), and the Program Director of the AI for Business & Finance certificate program, offered jointly by Columbia Business School Executive Education and Wall Street Prep.

His research and teaching focus on the ways companies can harness the power of data, analytics, and AI to drive value. He teaches classes in business analytics, including data science, artificial intelligence, operations, and technical tools such as Python.

In his eight years at Columbia, almost 8,000 students have enrolled in his on-campus classes, and thousands more have enrolled in his online classes. He has won the INFORMS Case Competition, the INFORMS Prize for the Teaching of OR/MS Practice, the Dean’s Award for Teaching Excellence, the Singhvi Prize for Scholarship in the Classroom twice, and the EMBA Commitment to Excellence Prize four times.

He has authored award-winning case studies in the area, co-authored the book Python for MBAs, and regularly advises companies on their AI strategy, including in an academic advisory role as Lead AI Strategist at SaxeCap, an AI transformation PE firm.

Prior to joining the faculty at Columbia, he was a data scientist and engagement manager at Palantir Technologies, where he worked with clients worldwide across various industries ranging from finance to pharmaceuticals to help them solve their hardest problems using data. He completed his undergraduate studies in physics and mathematics at Cambridge and MIT, and holds a PhD in Operations Research from the Columbia Business School.

BACKGROUND

At current institution since what year? January 2018

Education: PhD in Operations Research, Columbia Business School. MA (Cantab) and MMath from the University of Cambridge.

List of MBA/graduate business courses you currently teach: Over the last 10 years, CBS has made it a priority to develop a world-leading AI and analytics MBA curriculum, and I’m fortunate to teach a lot of the most technical classes the school offers.

These include Analytics in Action (a project-based class in which teams of engineers and MBAs work on real data-based company problems), Business Analytics (our core analytics and AI course), Statistics & Business Analytics (a core class for our MSBA and MBAxMS programs), Operations Management (our core operations class), Business Analytics 2, Business Analytics 3 (advanced AI electives at CBS), and The Analytics Advantage.

TELL US ABOUT LIFE AS A BUSINESS SCHOOL PROFESSOR

I knew I wanted to be a business school professor when … I’ve wanted to teach since I was twelve, so that part came early. The business school part came a little bit later. The summer after my junior year studying physics, I found myself at a crossroads. I loved the way physics uses math to model the real world – the idea that the motion of planets and the arc of a basketball follow the same underlying equations felt almost magical. But I wanted to apply that way of thinking beyond traditional physics.

That’s when I discovered Operations Research (thanks to a now-colleague at Columbia, Olivier Toubia). It’s a field devoted to using quantitative tools to study pretty much everything; from queues and markets to supply chains. It offered exactly what I had been searching for: a way to bring mathematical rigor to complex, real-world problems. That summer, I decided to re-orient myself toward that field, and I’ve been hooked ever since.

What are you currently researching and what is the most significant discovery you’ve made from it? Most of my time at Columbia is spent on teaching, case writing, and course design rather than more traditional research, and I’ve recently been focusing these activities on how organizations are actually using the latest advances in AI.

What has stood out most is the gap between how AI is discussed publicly and the challenges companies are facing in practice. The broader narrative tends to focus on how much more powerful models are getting and the march towards artificial general intelligence. Those advances are of course important. But for many organizations, the real difficulty isn’t about improving the cutting-edge technology even further, but in using existing tools effectively.

Companies are grappling with questions that are far more operational than aspirational: How do we translate AI capabilities into tangible business value? How do we integrate these models into existing processes and decision systems? And how do we move beyond narrow applications like chatbots to more meaningful, embedded use cases?

It’s telling that some of the most impactful recent AI advances – like OpenAI Codex and Claude Code – are not just technological breakthroughs, but packaging breakthroughs. Their value comes from how effectively they translate model capabilities into tools that developers can actually use.

If I weren’t a business school professor… In a parallel universe, I’m hopefully a pastry chef.

What do you think makes you stand out as a professor? You’d have to ask my students to know for sure, but I hope it’s my emphasis on the journey rather than the destination. The material I teach matters, but what I care about more is how students learn it: building the confidence to engage with new, evolving, and often technical domains.

I often tell my students that I don’t expect them to remember how to solve my homeworks five years from now. What I do hope is that they leave with the confidence to dive into unfamiliar technologies and make sense of them in a meaningful way. To sit around a table with a group of engineers and genuinely try to understand. That mindset – being willing and able to learn something new – is what I try to develop in every class.

Here’s what I wish someone would’ve told me about being a business school professor: How much of it is about connecting on a human level with my students. Of course, a large part of the job is knowledge transfer, but as I mentioned, it’s as much about the process as the destination, and that’s a journey we go through together.

That’s what makes the work so energizing. Even when I’m teaching the same topic for the twentieth time, it never feels repetitive. The experience is always dynamic, and that sense of discovery – on both sides of the classroom – is what makes it so rewarding.

Professor I most admire and why: Far too many to name. My PhD was also at Columbia Business School, so I am fortunate to have been taught by many of the Professors who are my colleagues today, and they are all exceptional, as were the Professors I was fortunate enough to study under during my undergraduate studies.

What do you enjoy most about teaching business students? I teach highly quantitative subjects to MBA students, most of whom come from non-technical backgrounds. That means I often get to introduce them to these ideas for the very first time – and that never gets old.

It is such a privilege to get to be the first person to tell someone about linear regression, or how large language models work, or the power of optimization algorithms.

It also doesn’t hurt that my students are (usually) genuinely delightful – it feels like I get to spend my days jamming on the most interesting topics of the day with fun, curious, thoughtful people – what’s there not to like!?

What is most challenging? The flip side of that same dynamic is the wide range of backgrounds in the classroom. Designing a class that meets everyone’s needs without boring anyone is tough. But it’s a great problem to have. I find that teaching technical material to a non-technical audience forces a level of clarity and intuition that’s hard to achieve otherwise. I’ve been surprised by the number of times I’ve found myself understanding a subject better after teaching it to MBAs.

When it comes to grading, I think students would describe me as… Fair, I hope? I try to keep as much of my grading as possible completely objective.

LIFE OUTSIDE OF THE CLASSROOM

What are your hobbies? Cooking and baking are high on the list – especially baking (more math!) I’m a sucker for a good kitchen appliance; set me loose in a William Sonoma with a month’s salary, and I’m in trouble.

Perhaps to counter the effects of my baking, I’m also a big fan of working out. I’m an on-and-off enthusiastic (and very unimpressive) CrossFitter, and I recently discovered Peloton running classes which have made me enjoy running for the first time.

How will you spend your summer? Re-designing my AI classes. Until 2022, it was reasonable to expect that when I designed a class, it would remain current for at least 3-4 years with some minor updates. Since the advent of ChatGPT, that timeline has collapsed. I now find myself reworking large parts of my courses every year. It’s been a bit exhausting, but also exhilarating.

Favorite place(s) to vacation: Less a place, more of an activity – about five years ago, I discovered biking vacations, and I’ve never looked back. There’s nothing like going to a new place, renting a bike, riding it all day, and then discovering the local cuisine at night.

Ironically, I don’t even own a bike in New York City (though I’m an avid CitiBike rider…), but I’ve fallen for bike trips as my ideal way to travel.

Favorite book(s): “His Dark Materials” (the Phillip Pullman trilogy of “The Golden Compass”, “The Subtle Knife”, and “The Amber Spyglass”). I may have read it over 20 times since my teenage years, and I devoured the TV and movie adaptations, which I thought were just wonderful.

I appreciate it not only for the depth of its plot and character development, but for the sumptuousness of its writing. Reading Pullman’s prose feels like sinking into a warm bath after a cold day.

What is currently your favorite movie and/or show and what is it about the film or program that you enjoy so much? I think my favorite show has been the same for the last 10 years – “The Americans”, a show set in the 1980s in which Russian spies are trained to look and sound just like Americans and sent to live in the DC suburbs. They have kids – who are unaware of their covert activities – and juggle the domestic life of an ordinary American family with their clandestine operations.

It’s everything you want out of a TV show – intelligent, gripping, and thought-provoking. The character development is second-to-none, and there are some sequences in the finale that I think are easily the best few minutes of TV I’ve ever seen (I won’t spoil them here…)

What is your favorite type of music or artist(s) and why? I’ve always been a bit of a musical omnivore – I’m happy to listen to whatever the benevolent algorithms happen to serve up. That said, I do have a soft spot for Mika, who also happens to be the only artist I’ve seen perform live.

These days, though, I’m just as likely to be listening to podcasts as music. I’m an avid consumer across the board – from history and current affairs to business.

(Talking of music, one of the most common questions I get from my students is whether I’m related to David Guetta… You’ll have to come to CBS and enroll in one of my classes to find out!)

THOUGHTS AND REFLECTIONS

If I had my way, the business school of the future would have much more of this… Interdisciplinary links between academic divisions – across both teaching and research. AI is making this even more important – it is a transformative, revolutionary technology, which has the potential to transform every part of our lives (for good but also for ill). I don’t see how we can navigate such sweeping change without every discipline at the table.

In my opinion, companies and organizations today need to do a better job at…I hesitate to sound like an academic lecturing from my perch – the world is moving so fast and so furiously that leading a company is more challenging than it ever has been.

That said, if I had to offer one piece of advice, it would be this: don’t sacrifice quality on the altar of quantity. AI makes it incredibly easy to do more – generate content, build features, analyze data – at a scale that would have been unimaginable just a few years ago. But scale is not the same as value. The harder questions are around the quality of the output and the broader impact they might have.

I don’t pretend to have definitive answers. But I do believe we can prepare for them. That starts with keeping these questions front of mind, and developing a deep understanding of how these technologies work, how they integrate into existing systems, and how they are likely to evolve.

I’m grateful for… Many, many more people and experiences than I have space to talk about here.

Perhaps I’ll restrict myself to the professional sphere, where I’m so grateful to Columbia, its leadership, and my colleagues for taking a chance on me. And I’m just as grateful I took the leap and decided to join them. My role here isn’t a classical tenure track position, and it might have gone nowhere for either of us. But instead, it has led to a job I love, and which I wouldn’t trade for anything in the world (except perhaps that pastry chef thing.)

DON’T MISS: THE ENTIRE 2026 ROSTER OF THE WORLD’S BEST 40-UNDER-40 GRADUATE BUSINESS PROFESSORS 

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