In August 2024, the Kelley School of Business created the Virtual Advanced Business Technologies (VBAT) Department as part of a schoolwide effort to infuse emerging technologies across the Kelley Curriculum. The Deans of the Kelley School developed VABT as a way to assist Kelley’s instructors in wisely adopting applications of advanced business technologies like generative AI and subsequent technologies in pedagogical design and course execution. In addition, VABT helps students learn the effective, valid, responsible, and ethical use of these technologies across Kelley’s curriculum.
According to Professor Brian Williams, Chairperson of the VBAT Department, reception to the department has been fantastic.
“We anticipated that between 12 and 15 faculty members would be affiliated with it, but as of January 2025, we are at 67 faculty members from both Kelley-Bloomington and Kelley-Indianapolis,” says Williams [could plug in more recent numbers prior to publication].”
All departments in Kelley are represented, which is fantastic for interdisciplinary technologies.
As VABT is designed to be multi-disciplinary and function across departments at Kelley, each one has a representative that serves on the advisory board. The members of the board, who provide guidance and suggestions, help design and support VABT initiatives and serve as a reference point for other faculty in their respective departments.
Will Demere, an Advisory Board Member representing the Accounting Department, currently teaches a course called Communicating Accounting Analytics where they discuss the role of analytics in accounting and work with various tools and technologies. One topic that particularly relates to VABT initiatives is generative AI.
“While most students are aware of this technology, they often do not have a deep understanding of how this technology has been developed and trained,” says Demere. “Further, they may not have experience with the limitations of generative AI models.”
In the course, Demere discusses situations in which using generative AI can increase efficiency and enable greater productivity. He also examines the limitations of these models and how they can produce erroneous output. He illustrates some of the limitations using examples relating to the course content.
“As these technologies become more widely adopted, it will be increasingly important for students to understand when generative AI can be beneficial and when it should be avoided,” says Demere, who emphasizes that evaluating content produced by generative AI models requires an existing degree of expertise related to that content. For this reason, having a strong academic and professional background will be needed to effectively utilize this technology.
“We are definitely all learning from one another,” says Williams, who notes that there are a number of remarkable things going on at Kelley. “In my role, I’m able to see things across the school that were not as visible to me previously. I’m continually amazed by the quality faculty members we have here who are doing incredible things.”
The VABT Department has three key initiatives. They include: 1) Sharing best practices with one another and helping to equip and upskill faculty, 2) Supporting existing departments as they consider and implement advanced technology, and 3) Supporting existing programs as they consider and implement advanced technology.
Williams predicts that within 2-3 years Gen AI will be integrated into the daily life of most business professionals, and he suspects it will greatly enhance the speed and effectiveness at which individuals who are skilled in the technology can achieve their goals.
“In some ways, this is already here,” says Williams. “A recent study using real-world workers found a 40% improvement from using Gen AI, and the tools are only continuing to improve. This is both exciting and scary.”
Kelly King, another member of the VBAT department, is excited about how the team works together to integrate artificial intelligence across all Kelley disciplines.
“AI is disrupting business and society at an unprecedented pace, far exceeding the adoption of the Internet in the 1990s,” says King, who is convinced that AI will have more impact on business and humanity than any invention in history.
“Our position as a world-class business school requires us to be first movers in adopting AI into our curriculum and research,” she says. “As educators, our new role is to develop AI-literate business leaders who can navigate and adapt to rapidly evolving new business models. The members of this department are the pioneers who will help shape the future of the Kelley School with AI technology.”
While it’s difficult to make predictions given the rapidly changing technological landscape, Demere believes the need for data literacy will become more acute as we continue to see the spread of generative AI and other new technologies.
“Understanding data will be an important factor in how effectively these technologies can be used and the extent to which they produce meaningful results,” says Demere. “This includes understanding the source of data and how the data were collected, measured, and aggregated, and being able to interpret the data in context.”
An important function of the VABT Department is to support and train faculty.
“Many of our recent events have focused on how faculty can effectively use new technologies in their teaching and research,” says Demere. “For example, some recent VABT sessions for VABT members have focused on content planning and creation and utilizing generative AI. We also share relevant news, resources, and examples within the VABT Department so that members can learn from one another.”
Accounting Professor Nargess Golshan is excited about some of the initiatives the VBAT department is working on, including a Kelley GPT. The problem with Chat GPT or any model owned by the corporate world is that they are open source and when you put in a prompt, it goes on open AI servers and becomes their data.
University information, such as student names and email addresses, must remain confidential. Anything that professors collect for a survey or experiment must not be part of public domain so having Kelley GPT with a Kelley server will be hugely beneficial.
If a professor wants to do research, AI owns their model and anyone running data on their servers gets charged for doing so. Doing a project of any large scale, in which large volumes of data is involved, could cost $10K, $20K, or up to $50K to run algorithms. Kelley GPT, however, will be free for faculty.
In addition, the Accounting Department organizes Friday brown bag lunches in which colleagues across Kelley from finance or marketing share how they are using AI in a teaching or research capacity. For example, one developed a Chat Bot for the class to save time.
“When you have thousands of students, you get so many emails every day,” says Nargess. “This Chat Bot will go through the syllabus and answer basic questions that get asked of professors all the time. I teach a technology related course so I’m hoping we can use some of these capabilities to show students how to work with these models.”
Leave a Reply