Jed Summerton
There’s no doubt artificial intelligence (AI) is dominating the conversation and infiltrating every part of life—from business to entertainment to education. Businesses now need a digital strategy to succeed, said Jed Summerton, faculty member and advisory board chair in the Daniels College of Business Department of Business Information and Analytics. And students studying business will have to know how to leverage the growing tech for success.
That’s why Daniels, come fall, will be revamping one of its standard courses, Strategic Advantage Using Data Analytics, to better incorporate the emerging tech. It will now be a workshop called Build a Data Strategy Leveraging AI, offered through Daniels Executive Education.
“Students are going to change [a company’s strategy] so it becomes digitally enhanced,” said Summerton, who will be teaching the course. “They have to build it and also learn how to make it a reality in the company.”
While AI has now made its way into many classrooms and universities, the University of Denver wants to take things a little further. “This isn’t using AI as a tool to make the next business improvement; this is how to use AI for outsized competitive advantage,” Summerton said. The approach, he explained will encourage students to enhance critical thinking. “We want to have people figure out what they want to do to make their business unique, then use AI to differentiate clearly and substantially in the market relative to its competitors.”
Data analytics and tech essentially go hand in hand, Summerton said. “We have long used statistics to get insights from data. Machine learning is stats on steroids, finding deeper insights much more quickly.” AI takes things even further by suggesting actions based on those insights, “and it can do so instantaneously, while the customer is still in front of you,” he said.
AI offers a lot of boons for business: It can boost efficiency, help business leaders measure and optimize processes, keep businesses competitive and better engage customers with personalization and ease. “The easier and better you make it to do business with you, the less likely your customers willgo to a competitor,” Summerton said.
For instance, Chipotle uses data analytics on its app to know what a customer’s usual order is (thus saving a customer time, so they don’t have to scroll through all the options). Meanwhile, the beauty company Ulta uses machine learning and AI to allow customers to virtually try on makeup from their laptop at home, so they can see what products suit them. The AI can even give suggestions, Summerton said.
“What we want to do is imbue a company’s business strategy with AI; not just augment it with digital, but transform it so that it is new and distinctive in the market and differentiating to the ownership,” he said, “whether it’s stockholders, private, nonprofit or a government service.”
Summerton also wants the course to challenge the way people view AI. There is concern about how AI will affect society and the job market, but Summerton said Daniels students should know how to best use the technology and be aware of its advantages in augmenting existing jobs.
And, he added, they should also know how it can supplement the human touch—which is still paramount in business—so that “AI can help people to enhance customer service, not replace customer care with an impersonal robot.
“Nobody will—or should try to—adopt AI unless they change their mindset,” Summerton said. “It’s not only the mindset of people who adopt this and propagate it and push it forward, but also the mindset of those who receive it in the market. Part of the course is about how to shape this mindset to use advanced technology most effectively to enhance our humanity, and how to think about it ethically when moving forward with a digital strategy.”
