Dear Colleagues,
As part of the Committee on Teaching and Learning, there is an opportunity to present your educational innovations at INFORMS Annual Meeting in San Francisco this fall. While we all believe that assimilating our discipline's fundamentals remains important, there are clear indications that the market for business and operations analysts is changing quickly due to the availability of AI tools in the analytical process. This session seeks to share the innovations underway at our institutions to address this new reality.
If you would like to share or discuss how you and your organization are addressing the increasing role of AI in analytics in your courses or programs, I am looking forward to hearing from you.
Ken Murphy
murphyke@uci.edu
Session Abstract:
Business analytics and data science programs have grown exponentially over the past decade. Widespread adoption of data-driven decision making to optimize operations and understand customer behavior created great demand for individuals who could generate insights from data. Today, the implementation of AI in organizations is changing the traditional analyst role, moving away from executing in analytics workflows and towards orchestrating these activities.
Traditionally, analysts queried, cleaned, modeled, and presented data in support of decision-making. With the onset of technologies automating these tasks, expected skills include framing opportunities, coordinating applications, and empowering users using agents and context-aware thinking. Academic programs in analytics and data science must also adjust to this new reality with respect to preparing business and engineering students for the AI-enabled workplace.
This session seeks to highlight the innovations of analytics and data science programs in addressing this new challenge. While fundamental concepts, tools, and technologies remain necessary, we provide examples of programs and courses that are well-aligned with the goal of preparing our students for the workplace of the future.
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Ken Murphy
MSBA Program Director
Assistant Professor of Teaching Merage School of Business
UC Irvine
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