Wharton Business School revises the study program around AI

The oldest business school in the country is evolving for the new world powered by AI.

The Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania has unveiled a new concentration of MBA and undergraduate in artificial intelligence. It will be available for students in the fall of 2025 as one of the 21 MBA majors alongside options such as accounting, finance, marketing and real estate. For undergraduate students who graduate in economics, it will be one of the 19 concentrations.

The new study program Will help students develop both a technical understanding of how companies use AI and a more conceptual sense of economic, social and ethical implications of technology. Students will have to take courses in automatic and ethics learning and choose from a list of courses to choose from exploration of data to neuroscience marketing.

One of the required courses will be the “big data, the big responsibilities: towards responsible artificial intelligence”, an ethics class.

“Foundations of Deep Learning” will be a new class in the department of statistics and data sciences, giving students an introduction to the technical foundations of AI, told Business Insider by E-mail, professor of Wharton, advisor to the new IA program. It will cover the technology underlying the BOOM of AI, including subjects of “which is a neural network and how to train it” to “generative AI” to “an effective learning” to ensure that students have “a good conceptual understanding of what is happening under the hood in modern AI models”, according to the Syllabus.

Wharton has also updated the program for existing courses, including the “Innovation, Change and Entrepreneurship” management course and the marketing course “Introduction to Brain Science for Business”.

In a university press release announcing the changes, Eric Bradlow, Vice-Dean of AI and analyzes in Wharton, said: “We are at a critical turning point where the practical knowledge of AI is urgently necessary.”

“Companies find it difficult to recruit talents with the necessary skills of AI, students are impatient to deepen their understanding of the subject and to acquire practical experience, and the expertise of our Faculty on the adoption and human impact of AI is unequaled,” he said.

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The intersection of AI and business

Wharton’s faculty began to discuss A new IA study program last year, Hooker BI told Hooker.

In May 2024, Wharton launched the AI ​​and the analysis initiative to study the possible changes in his study program, invest in new research, collaborate more with industries and create open -matter generating resources, according to Penn Today, the University’s official website.

Thanks to the initiative, Wharton launched the AI ​​research fund to help teachers continue research at the intersection of AI and business and the education innovation fund to help teachers adopt AI in class.

The initiative was also used to provide Chatgpt business licenses to all full -time and executive students from MBA from the fall of 2024 – a first collaboration of its kind between a business school and Openai.

In January, Wharton unveiled the Laboratory of L’IA responsible, which will produce research on the governance, regulations and ethics of AI with a “practical accent on commercial applications”.

Wharton therefore had several construction blocks in place for a new study program, Hooker told Bi. “A large part of what we had to do was determine how to structure a useful and consistent path through what we offered, then see if there was something we really had to add,” he said.

Students who graduated with a concentration on AI will be ideally fit in four areas, said Hooker. They will have a solid technical knowledge of AI to assess the design and application of AI models in a company and will be sufficiently informed to follow the new developments of the AI. They will have an idea of ​​the impact of AI on commercial operations. They will also have controlled data ethics and automated decision -making and will include legal frameworks governing AI.

Nowadays, companies hire candidates who specialize in one of these areas. For example, a company can hire an AI researcher to train large languages ​​models, a learning and development expert to teach teams how to use technology or a lawyer who includes confidentiality and data regulations.

But graduates of the new Wharton program can emerge as a jack-of-all-aai-trades. Their skills will be adapted to a future workplace where adaptability could be more precious than specialization.

“We expect the impact of the AI ​​on companies to be long and deep. Even without new pierced in human reasoning, we can expect the methods of IA to penetrate even more in the trade processes and our lives,” said Hooker. “The careers and employment titles associated with its penetration into business has not yet been set.”