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ANN ARBOR, MI — The University of Michigan announced its Ross School of Business will offer a new artificial intelligence concentration for full-time master of business administration students. “Current and future Michigan Ross Full-Time MBA students who pursue the new AI concentration will acquire a well-rounded AI skill set and become invaluable decision-makers,” according to the Friday, Oct. 31 announcement. Courses in the concentration are split into three categories: AI Fundamentals, AI and Business Models and AI and Society. The concentration allows students to take classes from a range of academic fields and other university schools, such as the School of Information and College of Engineering. “Many Michigan Ross courses have incorporated AI over the last several years,” S Sriram, associate dean for graduate programs and professor of marketing at the Ross School of Business, said in the announcement. “Companies that hire our graduates have forecasted that AI tool application is becoming just as important as strategic thinking for business leaders.” Graham Hardig, a third-year student at the UM Law School and founder of the UM Artificial Intelligence Law and Policy Society, said the new concentration will equip business students with the knowledge and tools necessary to succeed in the future. “AI could potentially be the most transformative technology of the century so it makes sense to be making it a more central focus of education,” Hardig, 28, an Annapolis, Maryland resident, said. “Embracing the technology, as transformative as it could be, is essential to preparing students to be effective leaders of the future in both business and in civil society.” He said it is important to spend more time and resources on “harnessing” the benefits of AI. Usman Ghani, an undergraduate student of both the School of Information and the Ross School of Business and co-president of the Michigan Student Artificial Intelligence Lab, said while there has been “stigma” towards AI use in the classroom in recent years, he thinks it is important to embrace the technology “because it’s here to stay.” “As we can use it appropriately in work settings and learn to use it well and apply it to our workflows to just become more efficient with what we do, I think that’s something that’s really useful,” Ghani, 20, of Grand Rapids, said. ”It’s just a super exciting time to be way more efficient than you could have ever been." The new concentration comes as the university seeks plans to construct for a $1.2 billion what it calls a high performance computing facility campus for federal government and university research into artificial intelligence, national security, and other sciences in partnership with Los Alamos National Laboratory. The university is eying two potential locations in Ypsilanti Township, one off Textile Road east of Bridge Road and the other at a former site of a General Motors facility west of Willow Run Airport. Opponents, who refer to it as a data center, are worried it could impact water and electricity and they have environmental and community impact concerns. Read more: Masked data center protestors litter Ypsilanti utility officials’ yards with computer parts The UM Ross School of Business joins a number of business schools in the country that have also added an AI concentration to their business education programs this year. The University of Chicago Booth School of Business announced in July the addition of a new concentration in applied artificial intelligence to the master of business administration program. The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania shared in April students could declare an undergraduate concentration or master of business administration major in artificial intelligence for business starting this fall.
