Just as the internet and mobile phones have revolutionized how companies have evolved to doing business over the past 20 years, the introduction of artificial intelligence (AI) is rapidly changing how consumers interact with products and how companies operate. To address the strategic commercial use of AI technology, the MS in Information Systems (MSIS) program at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business is expanding course offerings to further integrate AI training into the curriculum to prepare business professionals with the in-demand skills companies need.
“AI is a technology that can offer tremendous value to companies. We are teaching business students how to deploy those technologies to help businesses gain greater value,” said Bipin Prabhakar, clinical professor, chair of Information Systems Graduate Programs, and Fettig/Whirlpool Faculty Fellow. “From eliminating repetitive work to improving the consumer experience, AI has the potential to help companies meet their strategic goals and run more efficiently.”
New AI course offerings
The MSIS program has offered AI lessons within its curriculum for the past couple of years, but the latest updates now include an AI requirement for completion of the degree and two options to pursue concentrations in this area.
A new element of the program for all MSIS students is a core course exploring how AI technologies enable greater efficiency in business. Whether it’s programming a chatbot to effectively answer consumer questions or inputting employee work hours into an algorithm to alleviate a bottleneck, the Advanced AI Technologies course trains MSIS graduates to understand and use AI in business applications.
Through collaboration with corporate partners and alumni working in AI-related fields, Kelley faculty have introduced two new AI concentrations in the MSIS degree. Students can now pursue an AI concentration through two courses:
- AI Technology Design, Deployment, and Use, which explores the technologies available for engineering the use of AI and what it means to use the technology responsibly by addressing privacy, security, governance, and compliance concerns.
- Enterprise Process Intelligence, which focuses on bringing AI capabilities into business processes. By analyzing data from various back-end processes, such as procurement, production, payroll, and human resources, students learn to incorporate AI to understand process variations, efficiencies, bottlenecks, and how to improve the business.
The goal is for graduates of the MSIS program to bring into the workforce an understanding of both the technical aspects of how AI works as well as the strategic, ethical, and operational opportunities it provides. Through this training, info systems professionals will be able to support companies in implementing effective AI offerings.
“Business graduates should have some understanding of the technical aspects of AI. While they may not need to program the AI algorithms themselves, it’s important for them to understand the underlying technological aspects so they can implement this technology effectively,” said Hillol Bala, professor of information systems and the Conrad Prebys Professor. “The other side of managing AI is learning transparency and the ethical implications of this technology as well as any applicable regulations. That’s a major undertaking. Current business students who understand this modern landscape will be better leaders over the next 10 to 15 years, guiding us through the implementation and use of AI.”
The new courses offer significant practical implications as well as theoretical aspects of AI and machine learning. As companies explore adopting AI technologies to improve operations and customer access, they increasingly need professionals with expertise to develop and manage this work. It’s not enough to simply understand how to design, implement, and monitor AI technologies in a business; info systems professionals will also need to understand what it means for customers and staff to interact with AI and how it can be best designed for those interactions.
“The focus of what I teach is the human side of AI,” said Alan Dennis, professor of information systems and John T. Chambers Chair of Internet Systems. “The technology is changing so quickly that while professionals must understand the backend of this work, perhaps the most challenging part is how we, as humans, respond to the technology. How do we build it in a responsible way to achieve the best outcomes?
“For example, if an organization wants to deploy a digital human to interact with customers, you must decide: What does the digital human look like? Are they male or female? What’s their ethnicity, how are they dressed, what accents do they have? Do we let the users select these details? There are many user interface decisions that must be considered strategically because they have real business implications.”
In academia over the past several years, educators across the country have increasingly taken steps to determine whether the work students provide is their own and not AI-generated. On the contrary, Dennis teaches MSIS students how to use available technologies, including ChatGPT, to help them work smarter. Technology isn’t going away, he points out, so it’s important to train students how to use it effectively.
“Our students need to learn how to use artificial intelligence to complete their work with greater productivity than they could’ve without this technology because it is changing our world,” Dennis said. “AI is going to have the same impact on society as the internet and mobile phone did. It changed everything in about 5 to 10 years. It just takes a while for us to adjust the human processes.”
Artificial intelligence research in business
Kelley faculty members who teach in the MSIS Program are also leading research into the use of AI to better understand the technological aspects of AI, its economic impact, and how humans react to its use.
Bala’s research explores both the intended and unintended consequences of using AI technologies in various contexts. He’s investigating the use of AI in the job interview process and how various levels of transparency induce (or alleviate) stress. He’s also examined how the use of AI can lead to questionable behavior when validations are skipped during times of stress.
“My research projects work to understand how AI tools may or may not actually be beneficial,” said Bala, who is also the co-director of the Institute for Digital Enterprise at Kelley, which connects students, employers, and faculty to business applications of emerging technologies. “Hopefully this research will lead to major policy implications and other practical benefits down the road.”
Dennis’s research, on the other hand, focuses on new AI technology, specifically “conversational agents” such as chatbots, and their successful use in business. Most recently, this research has explored how well products with human features can sell themselves. The latest iteration of chatbot technology is a “digital human,” which offers consumers the look and feel of interacting with another person. Dennis’s research into digital humans investigates how people interact with this type of technology and when it is most appropriate, including how digital humans can be used internally for employee support.
“We’re looking at a couple different ways that digital humans can be deployed by companies. This could be as an individual agent, like any other team member, or as a personal assistant for each team member, one step removed from doing the actual work,” Dennis said. “There are many ways we can deploy these in business teams to help employers as well as customers.”
The importance of AI education in information systems
With many people already using Siri and Alexa voice assistants in their homes, society is well on its way to implementing additional forms of AI technology into daily life and commercial business. But that doesn’t mean everyone necessarily understands the best use cases for these technologies or how they function. That’s why the updated MSIS curriculum is focused on training students in both.
“AI is a black box technology–it’s extremely complicated and users may not intuitively understand how it works in the way that we may understand how our cell phones bounce signals off towers,” said Bala. “If you type a prompt into ChatGPT, it’s not easy to explain or see how it generates that text based on your prompt. To me, that makes AI ethics, responsible AI, explainable AI, and AI policy very critical in the next decade. If we don’t do it properly, we will see unintended consequences. Ethics will be a huge part of it moving forward.”
For MSIS students, this knowledge will be advantageous in pursuit of roles in technology consulting and business transformation. Equipped with training in how to implement and deploy AI, these professionals will be able to help companies do business better. Some of those businesses already at the forefront of understanding AI implications have been partnering with the MSIS program at the Kelley School to develop this curriculum and offer real-world use cases. Global professional services company Accenture, data processing company Celonis, consumer health company KenVue, global software company UiPath Inc., and AI startup CausaLens are among the employer partners who have collaborated with the Kelley School on the AI offerings.
“Companies are looking to recruit students who understand this technology because they need professionals who understand the real business issues that businesses are facing,” Dennis said. “Certainly, they need to know how to build AI, but the tough question is, ‘How do I change my business to get value out of AI?’ That’s what everyone’s learning.”
Beyond the MSIS program, the Kelley School also offers a six-week executive education course on The Rise of AI, for which Dennis is an instructor, to offer professional certification on the topic. In the future, MSIS program leaders are exploring adding additional courses in cybersecurity and robotic process automation to continue to offer a leading-edge education that prepares students to lead now and in the future.
