The profound impact of artificial intelligence (AI) on both business practice and business education has seen the UCD Michael Smurfit Graduate Business School bring the technology into all of its programmes and modules. “Our approach is not simply to teach AI as a subject, but to embed it in a meaningful way across our research, teaching, and student experience,” says Prof Federica Pazzaglia, associate dean and director, Smurfit School of Business.
“Our mission is to develop talent and future leaders,” she continues. “We thought about how to prepare our graduates for entering and leading in this fast-changing world and to do it with courage, with confidence, but also with responsibility. We want to give our graduates the ability to thrive in that world and to embrace AI and do it in a way that is very conscientious and ethical.”
She describes the approach as integrative. “We integrate AI into our programmes and modules to make sure that what we do and what we teach and how we teach it is very much about giving students fluency in AI tools, from prompting at the most basic level to taking advantage of all the ways in which AI can help them once they move on to the workplace.”
The approach is also research led. “It’s not just about using the AI tools, it draws on the faculty’s AI research, what AI can do, how AI can get it wrong. The academics bring that into the classroom. They show actual examples of hallucinations, and they show evidence of how AI sometimes can inadvertently be used to replace human judgment and the risks of doing that. It’s a very balanced and very broad approach, but very relevant to business.”
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Experimentation is encouraged. “Last year we developed an AI prompting centre for students,” says Pazzaglia. “We created a lab where students could see first hand how providing the same prompt to different AI engines will very often give you very different results. They are experimenting and seeing what happens. That is demystifying AI and showing that it is not an esoteric science, it’s something that you can play with, you can experiment with. Even changing your question ever so slightly will give you different answers and you need to know that.”
Students are also warned against the dangers of cognitive offloading, the temptation to allow AI to do the thinking for them. “There could be a tendency to do that because the environment around all of us is so turbulent, so fast changing and you might think that AI, because it’s a large language model, has the answer.”
The reality is that AI has an answer, but it might not be the correct one, she continues. “And it’s very important to both students and us as educators that we can articulate that.”
At a very practical level, she explains how students can advance their coding skills with AI assistance to automate certain aspects of tasks but there are also strategic applications. “AI can aid business analysis and business decision making in different ways, in different disciplines,” she points out. “Strategy is one of them. Very often, when students are working on company projects, they are asked to identify courses of action and make recommendations. They have to explain why they believe one is better than others.
“In that case, we suggest that students use AI to support and augment data collection and the basic sketching of potential scenarios, but then eventually their recommendation and their argumentation for why they believe a certain course of action is better is human-guided strategic insight. That’s the exquisitely human critical thinking and ethical reasoning that our graduates will add to the tasks they are going to be asked to perform in the workplace.”
AI has also been integrated into the career supports provided to students. “We have enhanced all our career supports,” she says. “At their very core, they are about making sure students can present the best version of themselves to employers. Most of the supports are now AI enhanced, which means students can use AI to review their CVs. A lot of employers screen CVs with AI so it is important that students can put their best foot forward in that respect.”
She emphasises the point that employers are still looking for uniquely human skills and characteristics as well as technical AI competence. “They’re looking for a hybrid-type candidate. That is somebody who is technically proficient, has strong analytical skills and has got good commercial skills. This is also coupled with having human skills.
“We have developed a digital AI and acumen framework which enables students to practice and learn on how they use AI, when they use AI, how important it is to verify the outputs they are producing and how they articulate their use of AI in an interview situation.”
