Alumni Speaker Series: Ahmed Aly ’24 on Liberal Arts and Bold Innovation
By: Caitlin Kennedy Downey, AILA Staff
The second event in AILA’s Alumni Speaker Series featured Ahmed Aly ’24, a Computer Science and Political Science graduate and founder of Vship, a startup using AI to empower truck drivers and promote equity in the logistics industry.
In his talk, “How a Liberal Arts Education Inspired Bold Innovation,” Aly reflected on how Amherst’s liberal arts environment shaped his approach to technology and entrepreneurship. He described the liberal arts as “a challenge to everything you think” and a space that teaches students to think critically, confront bias, and approach problems with curiosity rather than fear.
For Aly, entrepreneurship is “applied liberal arts”: a way of engaging directly with the world’s problems rather than studying them from a distance. He shared that his experience building Vship revealed how often workers are exploited for their labor, and how technology can instead be used to support and uplift communities.
Encouraging students to take the less-traveled road, Aly reminded the audience that innovation is rooted in human values and in building things that make people’s lives easier, not just coding for big tech companies. “The true liberal arts student,” he said, “sees all of this and chooses passivity or activity. Find a problem, fix it, and make the world a little bit better.”