Access to the C-Suite: AI strategies to enter the boardroom and prepare students for success in foresight fieldwork

This paper addresses a source of consternation regarding the institutional risks of sending students into the field ill-prepared to meet the expectations of external stakeholders. The authors provide one way — of perhaps many emerging ways — to harness new tools in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to augment learning and support the use of live cases in the context of fieldwork. The primary contribution of this paper is in articulating a learning tool that overcomes the “behind closed doors” problem, namely, that engaging meaningfully in C-suite conversations is hard. A solution, described in this reflections-in-practice piece, was to prompt engineer AI to create a “Chief Operations Bot” (COB) to simulate a C-suite executive: The student-faculty team input hand-selected, industry-specific, firm-generated documentation and, after asking ChatGPT to “roleplay” the COO, the student queries this COB in an exploratory fashion embedded in a contained, consequence-free learning environment. The audience for this paper is faculty responsible for overseeing student engagement experiences like fieldwork, as well as department heads and school deans looking to promote new tools and advance novel approaches to AI in their units. Additionally, students engaging in- or preparing for- fieldwork may feel adrift, insufficiently prepared, or lacking data, and may find utility in advancing their own independent learning by using aspects of this paper. In our concluding remarks, we survey the potential of this model and speculate on its application to augment learning in preparation for student fieldwork in foresight and beyond.

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Work Title Access to the C-Suite: AI strategies to enter the boardroom and prepare students for success in foresight fieldwork
Access
Open Access
Creators
  1. Rui Pedro Gonçalves
  2. Matthew Spaniol
  3. Nicholas James Rowland
  4. Niels Gorm Maly Rytter
License CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 (Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives)
Work Type Research Paper
Publication Date July 2024
DOI doi:10.26207/ee1w-nq56
Deposited July 11, 2024

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  • Updated Description, Publication Date Show Changes
    Description
    • This paper addresses a source of consternation regarding the institutional risks of sending students into the field ill-prepared to meet the expectations of external stakeholders. The authors provide one way — of perhaps many emerging ways — to harness new tools in Artificial Intelligence (AI) to augment learning and support the use of live cases in the context of fieldwork. The primary contribution of this paper is in articulating a learning tool that overcomes the “behind closed doors” problem, namely, that engaging meaningfully in C-suite conversations is hard. A solution, described in this reflections-in-practice piece, was to prompt engineer AI to create a “Chief Operations Bot” (COB) to simulate a C-suite executive: The student-faculty team input hand-selected, industry-specific, firm-generated documentation and, after asking ChatGPT to “roleplay” the COO, the student queries this COB in an exploratory fashion embedded in a contained, consequence-free learning environment. The audience for this paper is faculty responsible for overseeing student engagement experiences like fieldwork, as well as department heads and school deans looking to promote new tools and advance novel approaches to AI in their units. Additionally, students engaging in- or preparing for- fieldwork may feel adrift, insufficiently prepared, or lacking data, and may find utility in advancing their own independent learning by using aspects of this paper. In our concluding remarks, we survey the potential of this model and speculate on its application to augment learning in preparation for student fieldwork in foresight and beyond.
    Publication Date
    • 2024-07
  • Added Creator NICHOLAS JAMES ROWLAND
  • Added Copy of Manuscript COB.pdf
  • Updated License Show Changes
    License
    • https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/
  • Published
  • Updated
  • Updated Creator NICHOLAS JAMES ROWLAND
  • Added Creator Rui Pedro Gonçalves
  • Added Creator Matthew Spaniol
  • Added Creator Niels Gorm Maly Rytter
  • Renamed Creator Nicholas James Rowland Show Changes
    • NICHOLAS JAMES ROWLAND
    • Nicholas James Rowland