Rutgers Business School is systematically embedding generative AI into course work across undergraduate and graduate programs, pairing hands-on tool experience with ethics, critical evaluation, and new degree tracks so students graduate with AI fluency that matches employer expectations for the modern workplace. (prnewswire.com)
Rutgers Business School announced an institutional push to integrate generative AI into classroom teaching after formalizing a partnership to make Google Cloud AI and related foundation models available to faculty and students. The move is part of a broader curriculum redesign that includes a new MBA concentration in Artificial Intelligence, updated master’s programs, and embedded AI modules across disciplines such as accounting, marketing, supply chain, and management. The school has framed this as “future proofing” graduates by teaching both how AI works and how to use it responsibly in business settings. Rutgers’ program is evidence of a wider shift in business education: schools now balance theory with applied tooling, require literacy in model limitations and governance, and redesign assessment to measure judgment about AI outputs rather than rote production. Industry commentators and rankings have begun to recognize programs that center AI in their curricula, with Rutgers included in lists of notable MBA programs for AI-focused training. (business.rutgers.edu)
Source: The Malaysian Reserve https://themalaysianreserve.com/2025/09/09/rutgers-business-school-professors-integrate-generative-ai-into-classwork-to-train-students-for-future-work-world/amp/
Background
Rutgers Business School announced an institutional push to integrate generative AI into classroom teaching after formalizing a partnership to make Google Cloud AI and related foundation models available to faculty and students. The move is part of a broader curriculum redesign that includes a new MBA concentration in Artificial Intelligence, updated master’s programs, and embedded AI modules across disciplines such as accounting, marketing, supply chain, and management. The school has framed this as “future proofing” graduates by teaching both how AI works and how to use it responsibly in business settings. Rutgers’ program is evidence of a wider shift in business education: schools now balance theory with applied tooling, require literacy in model limitations and governance, and redesign assessment to measure judgment about AI outputs rather than rote production. Industry commentators and rankings have begun to recognize programs that center AI in their curricula, with Rutgers included in lists of notable MBA programs for AI-focused training. (business.rutgers.edu)What Rutgers is doing — a clear overview
Partnership and platform access
- Rutgers struck a partnership to provide students and faculty centralized access to Google Cloud AI, which offers an interface to multiple foundation models and enterprise tooling. The platform is positioned to allow classroom experimentation while adhering to enterprise privacy controls that prevent student-entered data from being used to further train the vendor’s models. (prnewswire.com)
- The decision to use a cloud platform that aggregates models (Google’s Gemini, plus partner models such as Anthropic’s and Meta’s) reflects a pragmatic approach: give students exposure to modern model capabilities, grounding, and enterprise management features rather than restricting instruction to a single consumer tool.
Curriculum changes and new credentials
- The school has launched or retooled degree pathways that explicitly include AI: a new MBA concentration in AI (available to part‑time and full‑time students starting in spring 2025), a Master of Science in Marketing Analytics and Insights, and a Master of Accountancy with a specialization in AI-driven accounting and analytics. Course lists show both foundational machine learning classes and applied domain courses. (business.rutgers.edu)
- Beyond new degrees, Rutgers’ approach embeds AI into core undergraduate offerings so every graduate has at least a baseline of “AI for business” knowledge. That integration is intentionally scaffolded—introduce fundamentals, then apply to functional areas (finance, HR, supply chain, marketing, accounting).
Faculty, pedagogy and institutional supports
- Faculty are reskilling and experimenting with new assessment designs; Rutgers’ Institute for Teaching and related units offer pathways and workshops for instructors to learn GenAI pedagogy, design AI-aware assessments, and navigate ethics and bias. The university has also promoted community hours, reading groups, and faculty fellowships to support sustainable adoption. (business.rutgers.edu)
- The school frames the change as applied and responsible: tool access alone is insufficient. Faculty are asked to teach prompt design, model skepticism, verification of outputs, and to create rubrics that reward critical evaluation of AI-produced content.
Classroom examples: how professors are using generative AI today
Rutgers’ published reporting provides concrete, classroom-level examples that show the difference between using AI as a shortcut and using it as a learning accelerator.Negotiation practice with role-play agents
- Management professor Zeki Pagda uses ChatGPT-style role-play in his Management Consulting class to simulate negotiation partners. Students run repeated negotiation practice sessions with the model playing a counterpart role; the AI challenges students and provides instant feedback, enabling iterative improvement that is often more consistent than ad-hoc peer role-play. This replaces or augments traditional in-class role-playing with a scalable practice environment.
Forecast analysis and critique in supply chain
- Supply chain professor Rudolf Leuschner has students feed their forecasts (produced by methods taught in class) into generative models and ask the AI to analyze patterns. Crucially, students are required to critique the AI’s analysis rather than accept it, which trains judgment on model output quality, overfitting risk, and appropriate use cases for ML insights. This treats AI as an assistant for analysis, not an oracle.
Marketing strategy and critical synthesis
- In Marketing Strategy classes, professors like Erich Toncre allow AI to be used for preparatory work—finding articles, drafting visuals, or ideation—but grade students primarily on their critique, synthesis, and application of marketing concepts. Syllabi explicitly state permissible AI uses and academic integrity boundaries so AI supplements effort rather than replacing student learning.
Creative asset generation in marketing labs
- Professor Madhavi Chakrabarty’s AI for Marketing course uses multiple tools—ChatGPT, Gemini, Firefly—to create creative assets and demonstrate prompt engineering in practice. Students learn how generative models produce text, images, and video, and how to iterate prompts to achieve business goals while documenting reliability and limitations.
Strengths of Rutgers’ approach — what works
- Employer-aligned skill building. Embedding AI across functional courses and offering specialized credentials directly responds to hiring preferences for graduates who can apply AI in business contexts. Rutgers positions students to reduce time-to-value for employers who deploy model-driven workflows. (business.rutgers.edu)
- Balanced tool-and-theory strategy. The program couples practical tool use (Google Cloud AI access) with coursework that explains model mechanics, limitations, and governance—an approach that produces both operational fluency and conceptual understanding. (teaching.rutgers.edu)
- Assessment redesign. By moving grading emphasis toward critique, portfolios, and live demonstrations of skill rather than pure output, faculty can better measure whether students truly understand AI-driven decisions. This reduces the incentive to misuse generative AI as a shortcut.
- Institutional support for faculty. Structured pathways, workshops, and fellowships for instructors lower the barrier to effective pedagogy change, making the program more scalable and sustainable.
- Data and privacy guardrails. Partnering with an enterprise cloud provider that enforces data-use and retention controls addresses one of the biggest institutional concerns: accidental exposure of student or client data and the ethical implications of training third-party models on sensitive inputs.
Risks, trade-offs and governance challenges
No curriculum shift of this magnitude is without downsides. Rutgers’ strategy is well-considered, but implementers and observers should track several key risks.Vendor lock-in and tool dependency
Deep integration with a single enterprise platform accelerates classroom deployment and provides centralized governance, but it creates dependency on a vendor’s model portfolio, APIs, pricing, and service terms. Rutgers’ choice to use a multi-model platform mitigates single-model risk, yet schools must still plan for portability exercises and multi-vendor competency to avoid lock-in. (prnewswire.com)Assessment integrity and academic misconduct
Generative AI makes plagiarism and ghostwriting easier; shifting to evaluation modes that prioritize process, reflection, and reproducible code reduces risk but demands more faculty time for live assessments, portfolio review, and proctoring hybrid work. Scaling such hands-on evaluation is resource-intensive.Equity and resource gaps
Not all programs can afford enterprise licenses, generous cloud credits, or GPU quotas. Rutgers’ model benefits from institutional resources and partnerships—replicating it at resource-constrained institutions will require consortium purchasing, open-source stacks, or shared lab agreements to avoid widening inequities in AI education. (business.rutgers.edu)Ethical exposure and bias risks
Students working with real datasets risk amplifying bias or disclosing sensitive information; strict data classification, use-of-synthetic-data policies, and model-card documentation are essential. The curriculum must include bias-detection labs and governance simulation exercises so graduates understand compliance and auditability, not just prototype effectiveness. (teaching.rutgers.edu)Faculty workload and incentives
Curriculum redesign, hands-on capstones, and industry partnerships impose additional labor on faculty. Without changes to promotion and tenure incentives to value applied pedagogy, long-term adoption risks being uneven. Structured fellowships and industry residencies can help, but institutional reward systems must evolve.Cross-checking and verification
Key factual claims in public reporting—partnership with Google Cloud AI, launch of an MBA AI concentration, and classroom examples using ChatGPT, Gemini, and other tools—are corroborated in Rutgers Business School press coverage and a PR Newswire announcement describing the 2024 partnership and subsequent curricular updates. Independent program rankings and industry write-ups (for example, listings of MBA programs offering AI concentrations) also list Rutgers among the active programs emphasizing AI integration. These multiple confirmations strengthen the credibility of the reported initiatives. (prnewswire.com, business.rutgers.edu, business.rutgers.edu, business.rutgers.edu, prnewswire.com, business.rutgers.edu, teaching.rutgers.edu)Source: The Malaysian Reserve https://themalaysianreserve.com/2025/09/09/rutgers-business-school-professors-integrate-generative-ai-into-classwork-to-train-students-for-future-work-world/amp/
