Recipe: AI in Your Career

Purpose

The objective of this assignment is to explore the applications and impacts of AI in the context of business operations. In the assignment you will:

1. select a publicly traded company
2. investigate how that company currently using AI
3. propose an application of AI that would have an effect on the company’s operations.

AI in this Assignment

• use AI to outline your paper, but write the paper yourself
• use AI to plan the presentation and slides, but write the speech yourself.

Tasks (estimated completion time: 8 hours scaffolded across multiple assignments)

1. Select a publicly traded company relevant. If you are having trouble finding a company, contact your instructor with questions or for suggestions.
2. Research/Investigate  the company’s current use or acknowledgment of AI. Check the following places for the use of AI or AI impact:
   1. Website
   2. Blog and press releases
   3. Social media
   4. Quarterly earnings reports
   5. News articles or websites that discuss the company’s operations
3. Analyze current AI usage and impacts. In a two page minimum paper, communicate the following:
   1. Explanation of the company and its product or service and customers.  Highlight the Vision, Mission, Capacity, and Learning (VMCL) of the company.
   2. Summarize how AI is used by the company.
   3. Highlight impacts or potential impacts of AI on the company’s business, specifically how AI might create opportunities for increasing the Capacity and Learning of the organization
4. Elevator pitch
   1. Develop an “elevator pitch” proposal for how AI could be used to increase the efficiency or efficacy of the company and its operations.
   2. In a presentation whose audience includes one or more C suite members of the company:
      1. clearly state the problem the proposed AI solution intends to solve,
      2. outline the potential benefits and competitive advantages of employing the AI
      3. outline the ethical implications and potential challenges associated with employing AI in this manner.
   3. The presentation should use visually engaging slides to support your message. Include facts from recent quarterly earnings reports to help support your message.
   4. Presentations will be in class and should not exceed 5 minutes.

Resources

Submission Guidelines

• Two page paper minimum, submitted in the docx format with editable text.
• The presentation can be made using  Microsoft PowerPoint, Google Slides or other presentation tools. Presentations must be exported as a PDF before submitting to Canvas.

Criteria for Success

• Attach a rubric to the assignment
• Describe what you consider successful work and/or relevant examples

Notes for Instructors (do Not Include This Section in Your Assignment):

Recipe Variations:

• Consider having students perform a Strengths, Weakness, Opportunities, and Threats (SWOT) analysis about the companies with respect to AI’s capabilities and the use of AI by competitors and disruptors
• This recipe can be adapted for other disciplines and majors by asking students to consider companies or organizations that are relevant to their degree path. The important part might be less about the company, and more about the forward-thinking that this assignment asks of students.
• This assignment might be constructed as a group project.
• The important, high-level parts of the assignment are where the students are applying what they know about AI abilities to their future careers. If the structure of this assignment around a “company” or “organization” is distracting them from this objective, then consider providing the company or companies yourself, or remove that element entirely.

NOTE: This assignment was written from the perspective of a capstone business class. It can be adapted to reflect an analysis of AI’s impacts in the industry or careers of nearly any major.