AI takes center stage in Penn’s plan for overhauling its business education programs

Artificial intelligence has been popping up everywhere lately, including business degrees.

The University of Pennsylvania made several AI education announcements this year, and the latest comes from its business school.

At the end of last school year, Wharton announced a new AI-focused strategy to prepare students in all fields to interact with and use AI, according to Eric Bradlow, vice dean for AI and analytics at Wharton

“We’re all in [for] everything around artificial intelligence and data science,” Bradlow told Technical.ly.

For example, businesses are using AI for data summarization, or conveying information more concisely, to write code. In other departments, like sales, research, HR and service teams implement large language models to write drafts, create chatbots and make predictions. Thiry-five percent of global companies already use AI and half of companies plan to incorporate it into their work this year, according to a report from trend tracking tool Exploding Topics.

We knew AI was going to be a big part of what businesses were doing going forward.Eric Bradlow Wharton

This is all part of the Wharton AI and Analytics Initiative.

The program includes a partnership with OpenAI to provide ChatGPT enterprise licenses to master’s of business administration students this fall and two new funds to support AI education, the AI Research Fund and the Education Innovation Fund. Other features are experiential learning opportunities with companies, hack-AI-thons, short courses, certificate programs and job fairs.

Building on other recent AI moves at Penn

AI programming is not new to Wharton, or its mother university.

Penn has announced a number of related programs over the last year, including an undergraduate AI degree and an online AI master’s degree in its School of Engineering and Applied Science.

The research center Analytics at Wharton also has a program called AI at Wharton that hosts conferences and a free webinar series called AI Horizons. As data science and AI become integrated into every field, students need to be prepared for that when they enter the working world, Bradlow said.

“We knew that AI was going to be a big part of what businesses were doing going forward,” Bradlow said. “We’ve been doing work on video data, text data and other forms of what we call non-numeric data for a long time here at the Wharton School.”

The school emphasizes hands-on learning opportunities and connecting students with companies so they can see how AI and data are incorporated in the business world, according to Bradlow.

A key focus for many Philly schools

Penn is not the only Philly-area school to incorporate AI and data science into its business curriculum.

Temple University has the Global Institute for Artificial Intelligence and Business Analytics and Drexel University has the Center for Applied AI and Business Analytics.

Internally, Wharton wants to collaborate with other schools at the University of Pennsylvania by bringing AI education to teachers through its Graduate School of Education, for example. Plus, Wharton AI started a healthcare analytics project with Penn’s medical school to run randomized trials and experiments.

At this point, students are not required to take any AI classes, but Wharton also plans to launch an “Everything you need to know about AI” course during the 2024-2025 school year. The school also plans to offer an AI major at both the undergraduate and graduate levels the following year.

“Every student’s going to have exposure,” Bradlow said. “No matter what your major and what your courses.”

Sarah Huffman is a 2022-2024 corps member for Report for America, an initiative of The Groundtruth Project that pairs young journalists with local newsrooms. This position is supported by the Lenfest Institute for Journalism.