In August of 2023, 48 first-year students became the first group to declare a new major at the University of Southern California: Business for Artificial Intelligence.
Business for AI is a joint degree between USC’s Marshall School of Business and Viterbi School of Engineering, said the Viterbi School of Engineering. Students will graduate with a degree signed by the dean of both schools.
“This is the first truly joint degree that we’ve launched here at Viterbi in recent memory,” said Yannis C. Yortsos, the school’s dean. “We anticipate this convergence will create all kinds of different opportunities for interdisciplinary collaboration, as well as business and other disciplinary fields.”
The new major has encouraged students to apply and commit to USC.
“With other schools, if I just majored in business, I would probably be doing some kind of technology-related minor,” said Chloe Ha, a USC freshman majoring in Business for AI. “This major perfectly incorporated both the business and analytical aspects I was looking for.”
The creation of the major began a couple of years ago as AI started to increase in popularity among the average consumer, according to Kimon Drakopoulos, the academic director for the Business for AI degree.
“AI developments have been very focused on the engineering side, and phenomenal things have happened on the tools side,” said Drakopoulos. “But then we identified that there is a big gap, a big disconnect between stakeholders that are non-technical and the implementation of these technologies.”
Nenad Medvidovic, the chair of the Computer Science department at Viterbi, believes more than a simple understanding of how to use tools like Chat GPT and AI Image generators is needed to be successful in the AI and business industries.
“To understand how those things work and be able to use them effectively, you have to understand the underlying principles that are used in those kinds of technologies,” he said.
Administrators at USC Marshall and Viterbi hope this degree will make students more than just employable: It will make them future leaders.
“Students will put themselves in a position where they can be thought leaders in these areas,” Medvidovic said. “Someday, instead of just going out there and saying, ‘hey, I think I could be employable in this world,’ you’re actually somebody who is setting the agenda in this world.”
The academic goals of the program include making use of AI within organizations, developing a sophisticated understanding of the capabilities and limitations of AI in a business context and making realistic assumptions for business ventures through AI innovation, according to the major’s academic overview.
The major has only been active for a semester and a half. Currently, students are taking lower-level business and computer science courses. That said, the school’s plans for upper-division Business for AI courses are already underway.
“The first upper-division course focuses on state-of-the-art applied AI ideas, all the way from experimentation to reinforcement learning and deep learning,” Drakopoulos said. “All the introductory stuff that the students have learned in different classes – from statistics to their CS courses – suddenly everything will come together.”
In the spring of their junior year, students in the major will be connected with industry partners to complete an entire project from scoping to delivery, according to Drakopoulos.
The major’s curriculum encourages students to network with industry leaders and pursue individual projects.
“Last semester, we had a two-unit academy class just for our major. We had a lot of cool guest speakers who would talk about how AI is integrated within their companies,” Ha said. “From what we’ve heard from our director, he’s planning on encouraging us to work on our projects that are related to implementing the AI concepts and techniques we learn in our classes.”
The directors of academic programming are seeking student feedback as the first cohort of students begins the major’s curriculum.
“Anything that we want to implement, Director Drakopoulos very much considers and pitches to whoever needs to listen,” Ha said. “It’s nice since we’re a lot more involved in the coursework than I thought we were going to be.”
Programming directors and administrators at USC are hopeful that this major will help USC stay relevant and up-to-date with emerging technologies by creating a new archetype of students.
“In transdisciplinary fields, like AI for business, you get students who are neither engineers nor business students, but they are students who have strong elements of engineering and strong elements of business,” Yortsos said. “This creates a new prototype, and maybe the future will require their expertise.”