Building the Bots: Perspectives in Applied Artificial Intelligence

Building the Bots: Perspectives in Applied Artificial Intelligence

Students in the Accelerating Ingenuity in Markets (AIM) program are getting more than a world-class education in applied financial management; they are also on the cutting edge of applying artificial intelligence.

Dr. Joe Wall, executive director of AIM, has worked with AI technology since its early days and is bringing his thought leadership to the classroom. The program launched a financial technology track last fall, just one of many ways the program is incorporating AI into the curriculum.

"One of the biggest learning objectives of AIM is to teach students how to utilize disruptive technologies to identify and create value, and artificial intelligence fits nicely within that mandate," Wall says.

Putting the power in students' hands

Students in AIM have moved beyond merely learning artificial intelligence tools; they are building their own large language models.

"We're focused on timely, relevant and applicable career preparedness in our program and we want students doing things that are going to be a differentiator in the job market," Wall says. "Knowing how to construct AI agents is one of the ways our students distinguish themselves."

Wall predicts employers will find value in offline LLMs, which are not connected to the internet. Companies are trending more toward these tools because they have more relevant training data and come without the intellectual property concerns that their online brethren have. To solve this, AIM program students created their own versions of these offline LLMs.

"If you can show an employer your ability to create these tools and apply them appropriately, you are going to be an incredibly competitive candidate for a lot of desirable roles," Wall says.

Designing personal assistants

AIM is doing much more than teaching artificial intelligence tools to its students. AIM is also designing agents and chatbots to replicate pitching to venture capitalists, simulate job interviews and help with job placement.

One of AIM's agents, set to debut in January, simulates a job interview. Students are given a set of common interview questions to reply to based on a job posting, then the model gives them a grade and feedback for the interview at the end based on factors such as brevity and professionalism of their delivery. The agent will also display tips on how a student can improve for next time.

Another agent under development will allow faculty members to generate 80% complete class curricula. A professor would simply need to input certain parameters-learning objectives, length of class, number and type of projects, etc-to get a product that used to take days of manual effort delivered in seconds.

"What we can accomplish through these tools is quicker completion of the monotonous parts of a process; people can skip right to the part where their expertise is actually required," Wall says.

Building an AI Infrastructure

When Wall envisions the future of artificial intelligence education in Marquette Business, he sees an infrastructure that can support multiple student interests.

"Let's say you're in sales or insurance and you aren't responsible for building AI tools. What we want to do is still make sure you understand basic data science principles, because that will allow you to make use of the things that are already out there," Wall says.

That vision includes an AI For All class that covers basic coding, ethical principles and use cases for popular artificial intelligence tools. Wall also finds merit in the idea of a secondary AI major that can be attached to a student's primary course of study, which would further augment their education in this area.

"It's absolutely vital that we show prospective students and their families that what we're teaching here has real-world application; that principle is guiding the way we think about our future plans," Wall says.

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