Collaborative AI: A Transformative Initiative at the Tepper School of Business

The Tepper School of Business is taking a significant step forward with a new vision: to create a future in which AI is a strategic partner for businesses—helping to solve complex challenges, foster innovation, and reshape entire industries. This ambitious endeavor, known as Collaborative AI, is a key component of the school’s "Building the Intelligent Future: Strategic Plan 2024-2030."

“At the Tepper School, we believe that AI is not just a tool for the future – it is the future,” said Isabelle Bajeux-Besnainou, Dean of the Tepper School of Business. “As leaders in business education and research, it is our responsibility to prepare the next generation of leaders to not only adapt to AI but to harness its transformative power in ways that will shape industry, economies and society itself. Collaborative AI is at the heart of this mission, pushing the boundaries of innovation and enabling our students and faculty to solve the challenges of tomorrow."

“There is an incredible future unfolding right in front of us,” said Param Singh, Associate Dean for Research and Carnegie Bosch Professor of Business Technologies and Marketing, who is playing a key role in shaping the initiative. “This isn’t just another academic project or classroom initiative. This is about redefining how businesses operate, how markets function, and even how we, as leaders, think.”

Leading this effort with Singh are Ganesh Mani, Distinguished Service Professor of Innovation Practice, and R. Ravi, the Andris A. Zoltners Professor of Business, professor of operations research and computer science, and director of the Center for Intelligent Business. 

To meet the opportunities and challenges ahead in generative AI, Tepper is embedding artificial intelligence deeply into research, education, and business practice.

From Energy to Deep Fakes

The research component of Collaborative AI will continue groundbreaking projects underway. For example, teams from Tepper, the School of Computer Science, and the College of Engineering are using generative AI to address the challenges of energy sustainability. Their combined approaches—technical, business, and systems—are producing new ways of thinking about policy, optimization, and market mechanisms.

Another research area focuses on human-AI collaboration. Researchers are asking: How can AI augment human intelligence—not just in automated processes but in complex scenarios where human judgment and creativity are vital? Studies are showing more effective ways for humans and AI to work together in decision-making and problem-solving contexts.

Tepper School faculty are also deeply engaged in understanding generative AI’s role in disinformation. Deep fakes and AI-generated content have proliferated dramatically, but methods to detect them haven't kept pace. Faculty are studying the broader implications for media, politics, and cybersecurity while working on ways to combat misinformation.

The success of projects in the Tepper School's Generative AI Fellows Program has illuminated the vast potential of creating generative AI for business, Ravi noted. Faculty investigate applications of generative AI in organizational behavior, operations, finance, marketing, and more.

“Faculty are defining specific research problems in business that generative AI has the potential to solve using tools like large language models, chatbots, and neural network architectures,” Ravi said.

In the Tepper School’s Center for Intelligent Business, faculty apply collaborative AI across all business areas to enhance decision-making, optimization, and innovation. Meanwhile, the university’s Eberly Center for Teaching Excellence and Educational Innovation supports faculty in improving content, pedagogy, and assessment related to artificial intelligence.

Reshaping the future of business

On the educational side, Tepper is integrating collaborative AI into all its undergraduate and graduate courses. Business education is moving well beyond traditional case-study methods. For example, Anita Williams Woolley, professor of organizational behavior and theory, has made her “Managing People and Teams” course more interactive by using AI agents to simulate real-life scenarios.

In one assignment, these AI agents, which process large amounts of text and context, created a fictional underperforming employee. Students then conducted performance reviews and proposed solutions based on the principles they learned in class.

In business communication courses, students use AI not only for research and writing but also to analyze companies’ AI strategies and suggest improvements. To prepare for future teamwork involving diverse colleagues — and machines — students use AI-assisted communication to understand the nuances of interacting with different audiences and across cultures, Mani explained.

But the initiative is about much more than integrating AI into the classroom: It’s about reshaping the future of business, Singh said.

“We’re not simply teaching students how to use AI; we’re preparing them to drive it,” he said. “We’re having them explore how AI will fundamentally shift the way we interact with information, the way companies reach customers, and how entire industries will need to pivot in response.”

In an entrepreneurship course taught by Sean Ammirati, Distinguished Service Professor of Entrepreneurship, graduate students are asked to start businesses from scratch over the course of a semester. This year, students enlisted generative AI as their co-founders. Ammirati saw a level of speed and quality in their ideas that he hadn’t seen in 14 years of teaching, Singh said.

“The students used generative AI tools like ChatGPT, GitHub Copilot, and FlowiseAI to assist with everything from marketing to coding and product development. The AI accelerated their progress and helped them push the boundaries of what’s possible in entrepreneurship.”

In the digital marketing course he teaches, Singh asks students to design a sponsored search campaign using generative AI as their Google Ads expert. With AI and a significant amount of prompt engineering and marketing principles they have learned, students can identify a product’s unique selling points, pinpoint the right audience and marketing personas, and understand customer pain points.

“This kind of depth in a short time simply wasn’t possible before, and students are already considering startup ideas based on these new insights,” Singh said.

Digital marketing student research also revealed how generative AI is set to disrupt the online search industry—an area with little existing analysis. Using Perplexity.ai, ChatGPT, and Gemini, they ran real-time experiments to compare AI-generated search results with traditional Google results. The results show how companies will need to adjust their marketing strategies as the search industry evolves.

“By the end of the course, these students aren’t just learning about AI—they’re actively shaping the future of industries,” Singh said. “The future of business will be led by visionary graduates who understand the transformative power of AI.”