ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú

Ernst & Young LLP (EY US) hosted more than 20 FSB faculty and staff members at the Nottingham Spirk Innovation Hub in Cleveland for a two-day workshop looking at AI and how to bring it into the classroom to benefit our students and prepare them for the workforce. During the workshop, FSB faculty and staff not only shared and learned more about how AI is impacting higher education but also they learned how AI is impacting their own subject domain areas.

“AI is obviously a very hot topic right now. For the global EY organization, AI represents a billion-dollar investment we are making in people, tools and technologies so that we can bring this to our clients and help them identify use cases,” EY partner David Shade said. “When students come off campus, we need them to be oriented around AI because that’s going to allow them to be more successful.”

Jenny Darroch, Farmer School of Business dean and Mitchell P. Rales chair in business leadership noted, “The active support from our industry partners is key in our ability to graduate beyond ready leaders, and David and the EY team are the perfect example – they didn’t wait to be asked – they came to us with the idea, then created an experience for our faculty and staff that will result in an even more business-aligned curriculum for our students.”

“We’re encouraging people to think about AI as a companion to the human, not a replacement. AI might get you 75 to 80% of the way there, but the prompts that you're putting in to generate content are also important,” Shade said. “The value add is the other 20 to 25% and this is where the human comes in and puts their own touches on the work.”

“David wanted to help ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú think about AI and its impact. He proposed a program that fitted within the broader discussion we've been having in the Dean's office about faculty externships and how to embed faculty in businesses so they can stay current and see how industries are using new technologies,” Associate Dean for Faculty Excellence Melissa Thomasson said.

“On the first day, the entire experience was based on a methodology called “Scan, Focus, Act”, which begins with scanning all possible information. We looked into what AI is and then we dove into Generative AI, and the specifics of how it can be used across different types of curricula” EY Wavespace Design Strategist and FSB alumna Selena Gillespie explained. “We then dove into and focused specifically on a few different industries and how they're using AI today, and what's going well and where it might go. And our final day was all about Act -- how can we turn these insights into actual actions we can bring into ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú within the next five years?”

Thomasson said an important part of the workshop was to impress upon faculty how learning to properly prompt an AI is critical to getting the most out of it. “You have to really go in and understand why it's producing what it's producing, where it's getting the data, what data was it trained on,” she said. “Think about if that’s a good repository for the kind of question I'm asking, the number of different AI platforms, and how some are more appropriate to your needs than others.”

“We explored best practices and use cases in supply chain, finance, accounting, and human capital. This experience, paired with collective brainstorming among fellow educators, inspired us to develop our own mechanisms to accelerate Gen AI innovations in our teaching and scale successful cases across our division," Information Systems & Analytics assistant professor Jay Shan said.

“The program started with a tour of product development projects that EY / Nottingham Spirk have done over the years,” First-Year Integrated Core associate lecturer David Eyman said. “They talked about product development and manufacturing from all angles of business: Data, accounting, finance, entrepreneurship, supply chain. The workshops culminated in action steps and each of us walked away with a plan for integrating more AI into our teaching to ready students for the roles of the future.”

“I think the big learning lesson is that the students are already using AI, and there's nothing we can do about it. So how can we still make sure that they're learning?” Gillespie said. “I think that faculty seemed to leave with some really, really good ideas of how to make sure that their students were still learning.”

“EY took us through a Masterclass of AI for context. Then brought us through the journeys of each of our disciplines so we could see from their perspective how Business is harnessing this power,” Information Systems & Analytics associate teaching professor Carol McGuire said. “I’m pleased to say that we were able to not only walk out of these two days with a better sense of how to bring AI back to ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú, but also for me personally to have a real appreciation for just how much talent and dedication the FSB faculty has for our student success.”

“Similar to how we teach in the classroom, the best way for us to learn the process was to do it ourselves. We were immersed in a collaborative experience that broke down silos while we learned about the integration of Gen AI within aspects of business that will impact our students,” Entrepreneurship associate lecturer Brenda Homan said. “Not only do we have new insights to share in the classroom but we have tools that will change the classroom and prepare the students for the future workplace.”

Shade noted that a winning AI strategy for Farmer School of Business and ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú students will have a direct impact on the EY organization as well. “ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú is a strategic priority recruiting School for the firm; it has been for decades and will be for decades to come. We've got hundreds of ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú alumni at the firm,” he said. “We recruit 60 to 90 students a year from campus. We've got a number of EY leaders that graduated from ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú. So there's this really strong connection in fit with ÍÃ×ÓÏÈÉú students at EY. When they come, they're successful. When they come, they stay for a long time.”

“EY is a true leader and enrich us so much in so many ways,” Darroch said.