Now, business schools are scrambling to fit it into their curriculum. Just recently, the world-leading Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University added several new courses to its MBAi degree, which is a program designed to combine leadership skills with new AI-driven technology.
In the midst of this AI storm, Business Because spoke to some of the world’s leading business educators about how they’re not just teaching students about the planet’s most disruptive technology – but also using it.
How is AI used in the classroom?
AI is an incredibly versatile technology and, as business schools are proving, there are a multitude of ways in which it can be taught – including by AI itself.
“There are a few examples of how we’re using AI in our curriculum at Gies,” explains Robert Brunner, associate dean for innovation and chief disruption officer at Gies College of Business at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. “As one example, I’m in the process of developing a course on disruption, AI, and blockchain – and I’m using a variety of AI tools, including generative AI, to develop the video transcripts and assessments.”
Generative AI (GenAI) is the kind of AI that combines algorithms and deep neural networking to generate new content – such as images, text and 3D modeling. With ChatGPT being one of the most widely known examples, it’s becoming an increasingly used tool in classrooms.
Teaching staff at Gies College are using the technology to plan lessons, set exams and to even fuse AI with tutorship in the form of chatbots, which provide students with personalized attention without wearing resources too thin.
“Faculty are using generative AI to help create and teach courses. For example, these tools can help synthesize difficult concepts into simpler language. They can also be used to create lesson plans, create quizzes or exams, and rubrics for assessments.
“Second, colleges can use generative AI to personalize the communications or interactions with students and alumni. This can be from improved and more powerful chatbots as well as personalized communications.
“Finally, generative AI is also slowly making its way into faculty research. This may start with helping to synthesize key points from articles, extracting common insights from across a range of publications, to helping write analysis code that could improve or extend an investigation.”
Using AI chatbots to support learning at b-school
More than just saving time, the use of this technology in teaching can also lead to innovative ways of simulating real-world situations without the otherwise high stakes involved, such as creating chatbots to imitate businesses.
“One of our professors, Doug Laney, built a chatbot named Illiana and set up the ability for students to chat with her to learn more about a fictional company (Nile.com),” says Robert from Gies. “The chatbot answers questions about the company’s background, operating model and strategy, data the company has, and how they are considering using or monetizing the data. Doug set it up so students would complete assignments for documenting a partial data catalog, advising on overcoming data-related challenges and how they affect the business, and suggesting ways to monetize the company’s data.”
Learning to code with generative AI
An area that is being rapidly impacted by AI is coding education. David Stillwell, professor of computational social science and academic director of the Psychometrics Centre at Cambridge Judge Business School explains how his institution is teaching students to use GenAI to code.
“Ultimately, I want the students to learn how to do practical machine learning, but they're not software engineers or computer scientists so I don't need them to write code from scratch. This year I have incorporated ChatGPT into the teaching, as it can explain and provide examples for the Python code I provide them with, and can be used to generate new code.
“In the real world they'll have ChatGPT available to help them to write code, so I am happy for them to learn how to use it in my class as well. They still need to know about machine learning algorithms so that they know what to ask ChatGPT to do, and so they can understand how to fix the inevitable bugs.”
AI becoming a part of most people’s everyday lives is an important concept to factor into education. Teaching students how to generate the best prompts from AI is not just beneficial, but crucial to providing them with important real-world skills.
David Shrier, Professor of Practice (AI & Innovation) at Imperial Business College London, explains how they are implementing the technology to teach students “prompt engineering.”
“We began developing our pioneering AI Ventures module in 2021, which is a cross- campus collaboration including students not only from Business but also Computing (and soon other departments). Mixed teams of students collaboratively develop a business plan for an AI startup over the module.
Building new businesses with AI in the classroom
“With the rise of genAI we’ve had an interesting reflexive experience: our student teams are both exploring ways to build new businesses using genAI, and also applying it in class. We redesigned our curriculum in about a week, right before the start of the semester, to explicitly walk students through the process of using genAI to work on their class assignments. We also encouraged them to compare and contrast different large language model (LLM) systems.
“Through this approach, we were able to experientially expose students to the limits of genAI (as they exist today): it tends to repeat itself when attempting to compose at length, and it often can provide superficial responses. Our students also began to discover, through exploration, principles of prompt engineering (the manner in which you converse with the AI greatly impacts what it tells you, and the quality of its responses).”
Though many people are wary of the growing use of AI in schools, David insists that its implementation is necessary to prepare students for the emerging career-space.
“Democratized access to AI means that people from many more types of backgrounds are able to develop powerful AI solutions, which is part of why Goldman Sachs is predicting as much as US$ 7 trillion of global GDP growth from AI over the next decade.
“Attempting to ban AI from the classroom is analogous to efforts, decades ago, to ban scientific calculators. In addition, the detection tools that many are using in an effort to spot student utilization of genAI are notoriously unreliable, with a high false-positive rate.
“Instead of prohibiting AI, we should be teaching our students how to use these tools to amplify productivity. It is incumbent us to prepare our students for the new face of work that is emerging out of this AI revolution.”
How AI can enhance essential soft skills at business school
Similarly, Philippe Monin, the academic dean at Grenoble Ecole de Management, a school that says it is committed to exploring the potential of AI, believes that responsibly embracing AI will only enhance the already innate human skills of critical thinking and teamwork.
“While every technological breakthrough is met with controversy, our focus lies on the potential of AI to offer numerous benefits in business education. Primarily this is around developing students' critical thinking and equipping them with the skills needed in a workplace in which AI is going to have a massive impact. Earlier this year we formed a multi-disciplinary working group to identify opportunities, assess impacts and develop training courses to help raise the understanding of AI across the business school.
“As with any technology, we encourage students to experiment with it, understand its uses and limits, and think ethically about its impacts. On the teaching side, we are helping faculty to adapt teaching practice to take account of AI technology such as ChatGPT and other generative artefacts. The priority is to integrate AI into programs, improve teaching methods, foster student engagement and skills development. We are producing a training manual to help teaching colleagues do this. Our focus is on harnessing the positive potential of AI.”
