All In On AI

With companies and organizations around the world scrambling to leverage AI and its many capabilities, it’s crucial that business schools take a leadership role—not just teaching students how to use AI but also training them to become leaders in the AI-powered world.

That’s why the Sawyer Business School this fall launched the Sawyer Business School Artificial Intelligence Leadership Collaborative (SAIL), which aims to redefine business education and lead the charge in community-based AI innovation.

“We want to prepare students, professors, businesses, and communities to be ready to bridge the gap between the AI revolution and business practice,” says Amy Zeng, dean of the Sawyer Business School. “Our goal is to develop and train future business leaders with practical AI proficiency.”

After using AI sporadically in courses over the past couple of years, the Business School has deliberately and unreservedly embraced AI this academic year and made it a major component of the school’s curriculum, especially for first-year students. The school has hired Executive in Residence Dmitri Tcherevik, who brings combined expertise in theory and practice of AI, to focus exclusively on the school’s AI strategies. One of his first steps is to launch SAIL.

“Many schools are taking a conservative approach to AI,” says Tcherevik, who is also founder and CEO of AnyQuest, an enterprise AI enabler specializing in generative AI platforms. “We want the Sawyer Business School to be more progressive—even aggressive—in rethinking our approach to AI assignments and ensuring students and faculty understand the ethical issues the technology raises.”

Faculty and students embrace AI

For the “Innovative Teaming” course, Entrepreneurship Professor Shari Worthington used AI to create a “textbook” for the entire semester, drawing from sources across the web. That’s a bonus in a couple of ways: The first is that the texts are much more targeted and relevant. The other is that students don’t have to shell out hundreds of dollars for a traditional textbook, much of which they might not ever use.

Marketing Professor Arka Sarkar uses AI to create interview scenarios for his “Wicked Global Problems” course, which this year is examining global food systems and food insecurity. He’s also using AI to summarize articles and create slides for his lectures. He’s even showing students who have no coding knowledge how to use AI to write sophisticated code that can analyze data.

For first-year student Baylor Olive, Class of 2028, AI was a four-letter word in high school.

“Our teachers spent a lot of time saying AI was something nobody should be doing,” says Olive. “I only learned the bad side of AI.”

But this fall in some of her classes at the Sawyer Business School (SBS), Olive has quickly discovered the good side of AI— that it can be an essential part of the curriculum, one that’s providing incredible new opportunities and teaching essential business skills. She and her classmates use it to expand on ideas, summarize information, and even improve their presentation skills.

“Instead of asking ChatGPT for the answer, we use it to ask for something more than what we have,” says Olive, a business management major and marketing minor. “Our approach is ‘How can I make it better versus what can I do to get an A on the assignment?’”

Much like calculators in the mid-1980s—when math teachers protested their use in the classroom, AI is not a “do my homework for me” workaround. It’s an essential business tool. “With SAIL and with our curriculum, we’re showing students that at SBS and in the workplace, AI has value as a co-teacher and co-worker,” says Zeng.

Toward that end, much of the work that students to do improve their AI skills is to learn effective prompt engineering, which means figuring out the right questions to ask to get the best output. In the Business Foundations course that all first-years have to take, students even submit their prompt history as part of their grade. They’re also encouraged to work in groups and share the thinking behind their prompts—and even use AI to figure out how to improve team dynamics.

“Because AI can synthesize interviews,” says Management & Entrepreneurship Professor Sheila Webber, “teams can spend more time with each other discussing results, next steps, and being more productive in general.” Webber points out that students are actually spending more time interacting with each other, rather than doing mundane tasks like data entry, because of AI.

For some, AI might sound like a shiny (and somewhat suspicious) object—a tech fad that will simply be usurped by the next shiny tech object. (Think Google Glass or the Palm Pilot.) Dean Zeng disagrees.

“Employers are asking that recent graduates have AI skills,” she says. “We would be negligent not to show our learners its value and how to use it.” She envisions students starting their careers and teaching their teams how to leverage AI. “SAIL is an amazing opportunity to provide students skills and know-how that would add value to their future employers and make positive impacts on the communities.”