W. P. Carey faculty use ChatGPT Enterprise technology for innovation across business

AI Innovation Challenge license recipients share how they leverage ChatGPT in supply chain, economics, and information systems.

The W. P. Carey School of Business introduced the speaker series "Coffee, Tea, and ChatGPT" during the spring and summer of 2023 to share the impact of generative AI and ChatGPT on teaching and learning and to bring faculty and staff together to learn from each other. The series rotates around the business school academic departments as conversation starters and involves faculty and staff across W. P. Carey, along with colleagues from other ASU units and the Office of the University Provost. This story is the second in a series about Coffee, Tea, and ChatGPT to share learnings with the broader community.

After ASU announced its partnership with OpenAI earlier this year, university faculty and staff submitted over 175 proposals to the AI Innovation Challenge for a chance to use ChatGPT Enterprise technology in their research and work. ASU Enterprise Technology accepted 105 proposals, six of which W. P. Carey employees submitted. During the 11th "Coffee, Tea, and ChatGPT" session on March 19, five W. P. Carey faculty members discussed how their proposals leverage ChatGPT for innovation in supply chain, economics, business, and information systems (IS) and, for the first time, W. P. Carey students attended the speaker series to participate in the discussion and share updates on the new AI in Business Club at ASU.

Jason Nichols, clinical professor and assistant chair of IS, kicked off the event by describing how his team is applying ChatGPT Enterprise to help students practice requirement gathering — or defining project needs and goals — in project management by simulating stakeholder conversations. Nichols also hopes to create a project management support application to help graduate students better manage their time and academic projects.

"This is a great example of using this tool to give students a robust simulation of an environment that's hard to come by while allowing us to scale it to many students," said Nichols, who is partnering with Information Systems department chair Pei-yu Chen on the implementation.

Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management Yimin Wang's proposal focuses on using contextual data to predict supply chain risk and investigate how certain regulatory stipulations could impact the global supply chain. Wang said a preliminary analysis of companies' earnings call scripts shows interesting potential for ChatGPT to create useful metrics on supply chain risks triggered by custom-specified domains. This investigation helps firms obtain predictive early warning signals on impending supply chain risks and take proactive actions to assess and mitigate potential risks.

Clinical Associate Professor of Economics Patricia Ramirez De La Vina discussed using her team's license to investigate AI-enhanced pedagogy to improve economics education, particularly for online learners, to increase student engagement, concept comprehension, and efficiency. By exploring prompt engineering and using AI images to tailor learning experiences and activities to the student, Ramirez hopes to streamline the education process and use the team's outcomes to expand other areas of learning. The team is evaluating their work's impact through student feedback.

Thomas Kull, a professor of supply chain management, is using his license to assist with a federal grant from the United States Department of Homeland Security. The project focuses on creating a GPT to help homeland security specialists identify what to look for in a supply base to ensure its resiliency. The license also investigates using GPTs to perform mundane processes typically done by people, like extracting data from long documents.

The call for proposals helped Professor of Information Systems Hong Guo understand the importance of understanding ChatGPT's underlying mechanisms and helped her research team narrow down their research problem. Guo described using her license to investigate, analyze, and combat ChatGPT's decision-making bias. The project is an example of how license recipients are implementing principled innovation, an ASU design aspiration, into their research to create positive change.

"How much bias does ChatGPT have? Can we trust its recommendations or analysis?" asked Guo. "We are analyzing its bias. But eventually, when we know more about how it works, we can help ChatGPT combat its own bias and better assist human decision-making."

Associate Professor of Accountancy Kimball Chapman, who is using his license to investigate non-generally accepted accounting principles (non-GAAP) exclusion collection, was unable to attend the event and will present at a future session.

W. P. Carey MBA students Jen Marey and Praise Ifetogun concluded the event by discussing the AI in Business Club at ASU. The club is a space for graduate students passionate about leveraging AI to drive innovation, sustainability, and ethical technology practices. It holds two monthly sessions focused on AI use in various capacities.

"We want to take this opportunity to learn and explore because it's an unknown space right now," said Marey. "The more we learn now, the better equipped we'll be for the future of generative AI."

"This 'Coffee, Tea, and Chat GPT' session was incredibly engaging," explained Dan Gruber, associate dean for teaching and learning, who along with the W. P. Carey teaching leads launched the series a year ago. "We have found a new level of impact by having faculty share how they are using these enterprise licenses as well as bringing students into the mix — both for us to learn from each other, as well as to prepare them to potentially participate in the next wave of the ASU AI Innovation Challenge. I am excited to see what happens next."

ASU faculty, staff, and student researchers interested in obtaining a ChatGPT Enterprise license for the summer semester can submit proposals to the AI Innovation Challenge through April 15.