The buzz around artificial intelligence, data and technology generally isn’t lost on higher education leader Michael Edmondson. He doesn’t expect New Jersey’s business executives have missed the hype, either.
But, if you think that means those executives know what these advanced tech tools are, what they’re doing, what they’re capable of … Edmondson wouldn’t say that’s a safe assumption. Leaders of divisions, branches and offices in New Jersey, frankly, don’t understand what something like AI really entails, he said, never mind how they can use it.
But, there’s no doubt about it: They’re getting an education in all of that and more.
Edmondson leads the Learning and Development Initiative, a collaboration between New Jersey Institute of Technology and its New Jersey Innovation Institute. His organization is one of many educational and training opportunities in the state that have emerged to better prepare those in business for the high-tech climate of nearly all industries.
“A couple of years ago, it would’ve been, ‘Will AI impact my business?’ Now, it’s, ‘How is it already impacting my business?’” he said. “So, if it’s impacting my business, how do we — in our resource-constrained capacity, as every business has limited resources — use it? And how can we do that within the established processes and systems we already have?”
It’s no knock on the greater majority of Garden State’s executives that they aren’t yet up to speed, while perhaps heads of Amazon, Walmart and other brand-name companies might already be, Edmondson added.
“As billion-dollar businesses, they’ve had to get there,” he said. “But, most businesses are small- to mid-sized. And their executives don’t know how to fully utilize something like AI. We hear about AI all the time, so, we might not realize that. But, it’s like this: Most people know how to drive a car, but do they know how an engine works? It’s the same with AI.”
Local colleges and universities have only in the past few years decided to get behind the wheel themselves, with many of their programs launching as recently as this year.
The business arm of Stevens Institute of Technology is one of the local institutions just introducing new courses this fall in some of these areas.
Ratika Gore, director of MBA programs at the Stevens School of Business, doesn’t expect it’ll be the last gap it finds on the tech side of executive education, given how quickly new approaches and tools take center stage.
“What has happened is, up until now, technology was considered a vertical, meaning we were catering toward those in the tech industry already,” she said. “Technology is horizontal now, which means even traditional companies need to leverage advanced technologies to do what they do better.”
Higher education leaders commonly speak to the need to have a versatile and veteran board of advisers who stay plugged in enough with business trends to determine what’s next.
And, with the speed of tech-driven trends today, Kimberly Hollister of Montclair State University said there’s a new shelf-life on business curriculum now. Years ago, you could count on a program remaining relevant for five to 10 years. Now, they’re changing course-level content each semester, and doing complete overhauls around every two years.
Hollister, dean of the Feliciano School of Business at Montclair, said that, besides AI, the most in-demand area of knowledge emerging at the intersection of tech and business is analytics.
“Years ago, there was a big push for global business (in education) — but, now, it’s difficult to do any business that’s not in some way global,” she said. “Business analytics is filling up that space.”
Although it sometimes goes hand-in-hand with AI-driven tools, business leaders both domestically and internationally are seeing the need for developing more of a skill-set in taking in data and using it to identify trends and patterns, Hollister added.
“Analytics has taken over marketing, health care, real estate development, accounting, finance,” she said. “Every industry is being affected by how much data we’re collecting and how it can be leveraged for better business decisions.”
The common theme? Tech fluency is what students are after today.
And there are enough potential angles to education even in today’s tech to round out curriculum for years. As an example, Gore referenced the need for education around data privacy laws and the responsible use of AI.
“It’s a theme that lends itself to many areas and potential courses, and we want to imbibe some of those learning objectives,” Gore said.
The responsibility side of AI is where colleges have had some trepidation about such an area, given that they’re wrestling with what to do about students using it to complete coursework.
“To be totally honest, higher education is an interesting place — one where consensus comes slowly,” said Stephen Tomkiel, MBA director at The College of New Jersey. “While ChatGPT and other platforms were gaining traction in the corporate world, we were still asking ourselves, ‘Do we like these tools or not?’ Because we don’t want students punching their homework into it.”
In The College of New Jersey’s business analytics program, they’re focusing less on what Tomkiel refers to as the “flashy” tools, such as ChatGPT and image generation platforms, and more on AI platforms built to serve business needs, such as Tableau.
That data visualization software was one Tomkiel said the institution kept hearing the most demand for from the state’s private sector, so it’s the direction it’s moved in as quickly as a higher education institution can.
“We’d love to be even more agile, but corporations are always going to move quicker than us,” he said. “But, as long as we have the intellectually curious faculty we do, as well as the industry contacts and alumni in leadership positions, we’re going to be able to discover the current trends and set people up with the right skill-sets moving forward.”
And, when it comes to setting students up appropriately for the future of work, Tomkiel echoed something that many higher education leaders expressed:
“As much as AI or other technology is hotly discussed right now, students are still coming to us for the core soft skills,” he said. “They want the backgrounds in analytics, but also want to learn how to run a team for that C-suite upgrade they’re looking at. Those soft skills aren’t going away.
AI inside higher ed
Colleges aren’t just teaching students artificial intelligence and analytics in business, they’re teaching themselves, too.
Here’s how that’s playing out for one local college: Anthony Iacono said it was shortly after he was named president of County College of Morris in 2016 that there was a shift to hiring data analysts at colleges to track trends and shape student experiences.
“AI takes all of that and puts it on steroids,” he said. “Before AI, we had computational studies we could run to come up with various models, but that took quite some time to develop. With AI, we can run those models dramatically faster. So, we’re very excited about the arrival of these tools. They might still be in an embryonic state, but they’re already showing potential to make us a lot faster and more efficient.”
Iacono’s Randolph-based public community college began its AI embrace by streamlining marketing and graphic design work.
“Another area we’ve started to use it in, and it’s an area we’re going to be exploiting over the next year and going forward, is for chatbots,” he said. “It has been super-efficient for us to give students the answers they need 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. They tend to be lower-level questions, which might be important to students, but might not be complex enough to require someone to walk them through it. That frees up our staff to deal with more complex issues for students.”
As the technology continues to advance, Iacono foresees AI-driven tutoring benefiting students. While he expects this won’t eliminate the need for human tutors, the same logic applies as with the chatbots, only these AI tools will be available past midnight on a Sunday (hours before that big exam).
He’s also expecting further integration of recommendation-based algorithms that guide students through their college journey — pairing them up with specific classes that might meet their needs and tailoring their learning experiences.
At the end of the day, colleges busy developing courses and programs for their students need all the help they can get, especially when they aren’t large schools with the large budgets and staff to match.
“Smaller institutions on limited budgets, especially one in a remote area somewhere in America — not a densely populated state like New Jersey — suddenly have abilities they never did before,” he said. “So, I see AI is having a big leveling effect, perhaps more than anything we’ve ever seen in higher education.”
