Getting students ready to face a fast-changing, AI-fueled workplace is a challenge that McCombs faculty members are embracing. Michael Sury, a senior lecturer in finance, is already there. 

Sury, who also is managing director of McCombs’ Center for Analytics and Transformative Technology, doesn’t just think about how to incorporate artificial intelligence into his class syllabus for undergraduates and grad students; he wants them immersed in its potential. That will teach them essential skills and boost their job prospects, he says.

Faculty members, just like their students, are adapting and evolving, too.

AI traces its roots to the 1950s. Decades passed without much real-world conversation until late 2022, when OpenAI launched its now-famous chatbot ChatGPT. The response was immediate and mostly positive. 

Sury not only espouses the virtues of this technology, he’s part of a growing number of McCombs faculty members whose research is centered on AI-related topics. More than a half dozen others from various departments at McCombs are studying AI and its impact. 

“Some faculty have been teaching AI for years, but it wasn’t in a form that could be used by students to complete assignments,” says Stephen Walls, assistant dean for instructional innovation and an associate professor of instruction in marketing. “The ability for students to use AI easily for their assignments was the thing ChatGPT changed.” 

ChatGPT can write everything from code to poetry to essays and can somewhat successfully mimic a human’s style, depending upon the prompts. As an easy-to-use timesaver, its debut in 2022 generated excitement. 

“ChatGPT — to most pedagogy — is what a calculator is for math. If you don’t know the basics of arithmetic, there’s no way to do more advanced stuff. Intro courses may rely less on the technology immediately, but the more advanced, the more you end up using it,” says Burris.

Walls, who, along with his instructional innovation team, is charged with advancing AI among the McCombs faculty, recognizes that widespread implementation is a work in progress. During the summer and fall of 2023, Walls and his team began working more closely with faculty members about how they might adjust assignments to encourage students to use AI more intentionally. That training included three summer workshops and two last fall, including one-on-one interactions to directly explain and help instructors understand how students could use it.

“We’re really trying to get faculty to start playing with tools like their students would use it,” he says. “We want them to use AI to respond to their own assignments and to start getting faculty to explore it in their own work.” 

Walls shows his design students how to incorporate AI into design experiences.

“We’re primarily focused on how to design products and services that create value for human beings,” he says. “Just because you can incorporate AI into a product or service experience, it doesn’t mean you necessarily should. And you should understand how to create it in a way that improves the human experience.”

Walls cites a standard assignment to research a real-world issue and write a paper that explains the situation from all stakeholders and makes recommendations. 

“That’s probably not a good assignment anymore,” Walls says. “We had the faculty member flip the assignment by having students put the assignment prompt into AI and let the tool write the response and then have students use our rubrics from the class to evaluate the AI response. What the student can then demonstrate is an understanding of the conceptual framework being taught.” 

While such practices offer a hint at what’s possible, McCombs’ postgraduate AI certification program takes it to another level. Kumar Murthuraman is faculty director of the Center for Analytics and Transformative Technologies at McCombs. He developed an online program affiliated with the global educational technology company Great Learning as part of Texas Executive Education and also directs that program. The graduate-level, nondegree certificates typically take six months to complete, and students are worldwide. 

“It’s been a big problem for massive online programs because completion rates were very low,” says Murthuraman, the H. Timothy Harkins Centennial Professor in the Department of Information, Risk, and Operations Management and the Department of Finance.

He says his aim was to “take anonymity out of the equation” so that students work together on hands-on projects and do real-time interactive sessions with mentors to prevent what Murthuraman calls the “nobody knows you” feeling of many online students. 

Andrew Ochoa, MBA ’21, earned an AI certification in December. Because it was a McCombs program, that “gave me a lot of reassurance and confidence that this was a quality program.”

“It’s certainly been helpful in my current role,” says Ochoa, vice president of customer engagements at a tech startup.

Darren Eastman, B.A. ’00, MSTC ’10, was also lured by the McCombs connection.

Eastman completed the AI certification program in August. He lives in New Jersey and has almost 30 years of experience in tech. He’s the principal product manager at a platform used by developers to deliver secure software. 

McCombs faculty and staff members are also working with employers to make connections that will help companies hire current and former students who are well-equipped to use AI. 

“Tech firms expect students to know how to use the tool,” says Sarah Nathan, managing director of McCombs Employer and Corporate Ecosystem, which works with more than 1,000 employers to facilitate recruiting and hiring. “We do work with some more conservative industries that are still figuring out an appropriate use.” 

Nathan cites a 2022 report from the Boston Consulting Group that reviewed job listings between 2016 and 2021 and found that 37% of the top-20 skills listed for the average U.S. job have changed since 2016; 1 in 5 skills needed are new. The report also found that nearly three-quarters of jobs changed more from 2019 to 2021 than they did between 2016 and 2018. The challenge to educators is to adapt and change their teaching as necessary but “make learning more agile and responsive to changing circumstances,” the Boston Consulting Group report says.

Burris, McCombs’ senior associate dean for academic affairs, says he believes AI is “going to change just about everything people do in their jobs.”

He cites two working papers — one from the Massachusetts Insitute of Technology and the other from the University of Pennsylvania, whose findings show “ChatGPT substantially raises average productivity” and that worker tasks “could be completed significantly faster at the same level of quality.” 

Walls is confident that concentrating on AI is keeping McCombs at the forefront of its peers.

“I don’t think anyone is more aggressive about it than we are,” he says. “We have students who are going to be users of AI in their jobs. Some of our students will be figuring out how to design AI into products and services. Some will be creating the next generation of AI. It will be the full gamut when they graduate.”