Surprise! An “Introduction to AI” course is already in the curriculum, and it’s required for business majors.
Dr. Tom Dodds launched the course with 13 students in the spring semester. Seventeen more have enrolled for this fall.
“My course expands people’s horizons about what they can do with AI,” Dodds explains. “Students learn to use the right tool for the right task.”
According to Dodds, most people think of AI in terms of LLMs (Large Language Models) like Chat GPT, but there are many other tools that students can use to build websites, create videos with personalized avatars, write code, conduct research, and compose effective prompts.
He rattles off some names: Claude, Gemini, Beautiful.ai, Canva, Lovable, HeyGen, NotebookLM, Prompt Cowboy, and more. Many more.
In class, he asks students to create simple plans to help businesses adopt these technologies. In marketing, AI can create ideas for selling a new product to a target audience. In finance, AI can analyze a spreadsheet to discover cost-cutting methods. For a presentation, AI can read a script and produce a slick PowerPoint.
Of course, when a non-sentient program produces work for a student, ethical questions arise, and Dodds admits spending significant class time discussing ethics. He emphasizes the critical nature of students developing their own voices.
“Your voice is who you are,” he says. “Without that voice, you lose your identity in meetings and with customers. You’ve got to put in the time to develop your voice.
“I agree with Pope Leo. The human side of this process is what’s most important. AI is just math. It’s intelligent math, but it’s still just 1’s and 0’s. As the Pope said, it will never replace the capacity for human reflection.”
Dodds makes this approach clear from the outset, writing in his course description that “AI should enhance your thinking, not replace it. Treat AI-generated content as a starting point that requires your own evaluation. AI makes mistakes and should never be treated as a finished product.”
He foresees a day when an “Introduction to AI” course is no longer necessary. “I think the shelf life for this course might be 3-4 years before everybody’s using it anyway,” he muses. “It will be integrated into everybody’s courses.”
For now, though, he believes AI literacy is important because of the job market. He notes that Citibank, Bank of New York, and Google require their people to use AI, and he wants Neumann graduates to be competitive in the job market.