Watch the Video Introduction on YouTube
Business Education in the Age of AI
When we last focused Inside Lundquist on artificial intelligence in September, I shared a look at how quickly we were bringing AI into the curriculum and giving students hands-on opportunities to apply it in novel and meaningful ways. Only a few months later, the pace of change has made one thing clear: as a top business school at a leading university, we are on the front lines of how AI is reshaping education, research, experiential learning, industry, and the future of business.
As such, I have been spending a great deal of time talking with alumni, business leaders, faculty, staff, and peer deans about AI. The conversations are wide-ranging, but they often come back to the same core questions: How do we ensure students truly understand the business principles we are teaching? How do we prepare them to use powerful new tools responsibly and effectively? And how do we help organizations adapt without losing sight of human judgment, creativity, ethics, and expertise?
At Lundquist, we are taking these questions seriously, and we are meeting the moment with urgency and purpose.
Keeping Learning Real
For us, the first challenge is also one of the most important. It's ensuring that students truly master the material. If students can use AI to generate answers, summaries, code, analyses, presentations, and even business plans, then we have a responsibility to make sure grades still reflect what students have actually mastered and can apply in real business contexts.
That does not mean turning away from AI. Quite the opposite. It means being thoughtful about where and how it belongs.
And it's why this past fall, the college implemented new guidance for student assessments that emphasizes verified, independently demonstrated learning. Faculty retain broad flexibility in course design and pedagogy, but we now require that a substantial share of assessment occurs through in-class, proctored, or otherwise verifiable work. That might include exams, in-class writing and case analyses, presentations, data exercises with impromptu questions, or AI-assisted work where the human contribution can be clearly identified and evaluated.
This matters deeply. We owe it to our students, our employers, and our alumni to protect the value of a Lundquist degree. Our students must learn and intimately understand the fundamentals of accounting, finance, marketing, operations, entrepreneurship, analytics, management, and strategy in order to develop their business acumen—and to not rely on AI as a substitute for mastery.
At the same time, we would be failing our students if we did not prepare them to use AI in the workplace they are entering.
Building Fluency
That is why we are also aggressively integrating AI across the college. Our goal is not simply to expose students to the latest tools. We want them to understand how AI works, where it creates value, where it falls short, and how to use it to advance business with judgment and integrity.
We are doing this in a number of ways. This fall, we will pilot a new AI and Business course, and we are working toward making an AI course required for all business and accounting majors by fall 2027. We are also mapping out our curriculum to identify areas where we can strategically integrate AI and expand opportunities for students to design and manage AI agents.
Ralph Heidl, associate professor of management and Inman Research Scholar, for instance, has already taught students in the honors program and the Oregon Executive MBA how to build AI agents and bots. Now, he is developing additional coursework focused on multi-agent systems and the management of multiple agents. This growth area is especially relevant to industry as companies move from experimenting with AI tools to building coordinated systems that support analysis, decision-making, and operations across the organization.
The School of Accounting is also moving with purpose. Faculty have integrated AI literacy into the curriculum, helping students evaluate both the capabilities and limitations of AI. In Introduction to Financial Accounting, students have used ChatGPT to forecast financial statements for public companies, examine the assumptions behind those forecasts, and evaluate the reasonableness of the outputs. In the Master of Accounting program, students are building prompt-engineering skills, using AI to assist with research and technical memos, and even learning the neural network fundamentals behind large language models to build and customize their own chatbots.
This is exactly the kind of preparation students need, gaining hands-on fluency with AI while pairing it with critical thinking. But these curricular advances are only part of the story.
AI in Action
One of the strengths of the Lundquist College has always been experiential learning, and AI is rapidly becoming part of that ecosystem as well through projects, trainings, competitions, and industry partnerships.
Through our industry-informed skills-building Professional Edge program, for example, students are completing microcredential-eligible trainings in areas such as Developing Business Value with Generative AI, Data and AI, and AWS Academy: Generative AI Foundations. These trainings give students practical experience with AI tools, data, prompting, and implementation. They then take the skills from these trainings and apply them through Professional Edge immersions at real companies. This spring, for example, students researched and identified business challenges or opportunities at Lithia & Driveway that could be leveraged with AI to achieve competitive, cost-saving, and strategic growth advantages. Then they built working software prototypes with AI tools like Base44 and Loveable that they shared and presented to company executives.
Additional examples of students innovating with AI could be found at QuackHacks 3, a student-run AI hackathon led by business and philosophy major Maggie Bryne that took place May 30–31 at the EMU Ballroom in the center of campus. With more than 250 participants, more than $10,000 in prizes, and recognition as an official Major League Hacking event, it reflects the energy our students are bringing to this space. What I love about events like this is that they welcome students across majors and experience levels. Students are not just talking about innovation; they are building, testing, learning, and creating portfolio-ready projects in real time.
Similarly, our months-long campus-wide entrepreneurship competition and mentorship program, the Oregon Innovation Challenge, is seeing the same pattern. Nearly all of this year's student startup projects were enabled by AI in some way, and several are AI-first ventures. One project, Alto, is using AI to help organizations make PDFs legally accessible to people with disabilities. Another, Atlas AI, is building a computer vision system to help general aviation pilots improve traffic awareness and reduce workload. These ventures show how our students are at the forefront of launching companies where technology, market needs, and social impact intersect.
The Promise and Limits of AI
As students put AI to work in courses, trainings, and competitions, our faculty and PhD students are asking and researching complementary questions: How is AI changing work, scholarship, creativity, and decision-making?
Indeed, recent research by associate professor of management Alex Murray, along with coauthors Claudine Gartenberg, Sharique Hasan, and Lamar Pierce, is making waves in Nature and Forbes, and even at OpenAI (where they presented the findings). In their study, Murray and coauthors examined how AI is affecting submissions and peer reviews at Organization Science, a major academic journal. They found that manuscript submissions rose 42 percent after ChatGPT's release, while writing quality declined, with AI-generated writing accounting for nearly all of those trends. This influx has overwhelmed the journal's peer-review system, prompting reviewers to, likewise, increasingly rely on AI to generate feedback that tends to be narrower in scope and lower in quality. The authors post that this trend toward producing "more" rather than "better" research is heavily fueled by institutional publish-or-perish incentives that reward publication counts over rigorous inquiry. As a consequence, they argue that universities and journals should reform incentive structures to prioritize meaningful research quality over volume in order to prevent the collapse of the review process and unlock AI's true potential as a research tool.
That same tension between productivity and quality also emerged in recently in pilot study undertaken by management PhD student Insights Research Lab. She randomly assigned 145 participants to brainstorm fitness-app improvements with or without a chatbot, and then asked six independent raters to score the ideas for novelty and appropriateness. The findings were striking: the chatbot helped participants generate ideas that were more appropriate, relevant, and well-targeted, but it did not increase originality. Shiralian also examined whether certain types of thinkers benefited more than others, looking at cognitive flexibility and metacognition, and found the effect held broadly across different cognitive profiles. In other words, AI was less like a spark for true novelty and more of a refining aid.
Both Murray's and Shiralian's findings dovetail nicely with what we are witnessing in the classroom—and what businesses are increasingly experiencing in the workplace: AI can increase productivity, but productivity is not the same as understanding. It can refine ideas, but it does not automatically create originality. And it can assist decision-making, but it does not replace accountability.
Meeting the Moment
Clearly, AI is changing business education (and business!), but it is also creating new opportunities for Lundquist to lead—and we intend to continue to adapt, study, consider, and innovate in this space.
This fall, we plan to bring in a national educator affiliated with the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (our accreditation body) to conduct AI workshops for our faculty and staff. We are also beginning to build AI industry circles with alumni and business partners (reach out if you're interested). And as we expand corporate education, AI will be a key area where we can help organizations—especially small and medium-sized firms—understand how to responsibly integrate these tools into their organizations.
There is tremendous opportunity for the college ahead. Yes, AI will continue to evolve. Some of that evolution will be exciting. Some will be disruptive. Our job is to make sure Lundquist students are ready for both.
If you're interested in investing in and supporting our AI efforts, please reach out. And as always, I welcome your feedback and thoughts.
Go Ducks!
Bruce Blonigen
Edward Maletis Dean, Lundquist College of Business
Philip H. Knight Professor of Social Science
University of Oregon