Charting McCombs’ AI Future
As The World Reckons With AI, Instructors Are Finding Innovative Ways To Incorporate It Into Their Teaching
By Omar L. Gallaga
There have been multiple watershed moments in the evolution of artificial intelligence, but one of the most important recent ones happened in November 2022, when OpenAI introduced ChatGPT.
The chatbot tool quickly brought to the mainstream large language models built on research that went back to the 1950s and ’60s and advanced with a 2017 breakthrough from Google. As it did throughout higher education, ChatGPT’s debut caused waves at the McCombs School of Business, which suddenly had to reckon with what to do when students had access to tools that could help do their assignments, remembers Stephen Walls, assistant dean of instructional innovation and associate professor of instruction at McCombs.
“The initial response was all about understanding the AI and what it was capable of, and then the other immediate response was ‘how do we protect our assignments and courses from students’ use of AI?’”
Luckily, that approach didn’t last long. Leaders at McCombs realized it was futile to restrict a technology that was rapidly becoming pervasive. They pivoted to an approach that continues today. “We’ve set about trying to create frameworks, resources, trainings, one-on-one consultations, best practices, initiatives, and pilot projects to embrace generative AI in the most intentional and appropriate ways throughout our courses,” Walls says.
But in addition to those offerings for students, Walls and others have been working to create a community around AI for those teaching as well, by building tools, facilitating discussions, and sharing knowledge around AI to help them be even more well-versed in these tools than those they’ll be teaching. “One of our goals is to increase AI fluency,” Walls says. “The other is to help them understand how AI can support them in their learning and teaching roles; it helps them to develop courses and course objectives and assignments.”
Now, there are efforts to bring those projects, resources, and people together to advance that work and make sure it’s accessible. Those initiatives stretch from creating ways to make McCombs research more usable for classroom instruction to leveraging AI itself to help with things such as creating skill badges and engaging in simulations that mimic a pitch meeting with executives. A website that will help highlight those efforts for the McCombs community and prospective students is in the works. Faculty members continue to meet in weekly Zoom sessions to share tips on AI and to discuss the technology. And one major goal is to make McCombs research going back decades more easily accessible and available to teach with by employing AI tech. By using tools such as AI summaries, instructors would be able to more easily find research from McCombs’ archives that applies to their lessons; other AI tools could make incorporating information from research papers into their teaching materials
easier, too.
New AI work is happening every day, but here are a few of the AI initiatives that Walls and others have been working on for McCombs:
Earning badges to show the work
For students developing AI skills in classes, the knowledge itself is the most valuable part of the experience. But digital badges developed at McCombs help show specific skills and achievements picked up along the way. So far, there are 10 skill badges in areas such as prompt development and AI for business applications in addition to an AI Essentials for McCombs MBA pathway.
“We lock it down. The student gets to decide how and when they share it,” Walls says.
Getting agentic with AI business experts
One of the more buzzed-about subjects is the shift to agentic AI: using so-called AI agents to take on tasks over time or to engage in jobs autonomously, among other potential uses.
Assistant professor of instruction John Graff has been working on several AI projects and applications that take the power AI has to create personas and use them for skills training or business case debates in class.
For an AI tool Graff created, the AI Executive Panel Simulator, students can upload a strategic analysis and then field real-time questions from a virtual set of C-level executives. (Think “Shark Tank,” but with AI-created executive panelists.) The simulator is meant to be a trial run for the kind of business pitching students may do in the future, allowing them to learn how to strengthen their analysis and build their confidence in presenting.
Graff also built tools for faculty members including a Business Case Creator and McCombs Case Toolkit that instructors can use to create classroom-ready case studies that could feature up-to-the-minute events.
He has even built a way to get historically significant business experts to chime in. “I took 15 of the greatest business strategists, including Michael Porter, Clayton Christensen, and Warren Buffett, and created this AI agent view.”
The simulated business experts can debate a specific business dilemma or business strategy. “If they type something into an AI chat and then get one answer, that’s not critical thinking,” Graff says. “I set this up so what you expose students to is the debate.”
A laboratory for AI in the enterprise
Associate professor of instruction in marketing Ben Bentzin has been thinking a lot about the ways instructors can be helped on their AI journeys. During the past two years, in his role at a Teaching Fellow, he has been working to help others integrate AI into their
instructing.
He’s convinced that a few elements are making a difference. Helping teachers get “easy wins” by removing the intimidation factor helps build confidence for AI use. Finding good use cases that help them do things such as create slides or generate lesson plans are a few ways to do that. Having access to the latest AI tools, he says, also makes a difference.
Like Graff, Bentzin has been learning AI tools such as Anthropic’s Claude and using them to try new things, such as organizing class discussions around current business stories that would have been too time-consuming to put together before AI. He also writes a Substack newsletter about AI in business.
Bentzin is teaching AI for Competitive Advantage, an elective in the McCombs MBA program that helps students learn AI tools for personal productivity or their post-McCombs career. But the ultimate goal is to make them change agents and leaders in AI at their organizations. That objective is a pressing business challenge as companies invest millions, sometimes billions, into AI technologies.
“It’s not easy to integrate AI into an enterprise,” Bentzin says. “The challenges we’re having with faculty adoption of AI, it’s a perfect laboratory for the challenges that for-profit companies have in adopting AI.”
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