The nation’s oldest business school is evolving for the new, AI-powered world.
The University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School has unveiled a new MBA major and undergraduate concentration in artificial intelligence. It will be available to students in the fall of 2025 as one of 21 MBA majors alongside options like accounting, finance, marketing, and real estate. For undergraduates who earn a degree in economics, it’ll be one of 19 concentrations.
The new curriculum will help students develop both a technical understanding of how businesses are using AI and a more conceptual sense of the technology’s economic, social, and ethical implications. Students will be required to take classes in machine learning and ethics and choose from a list of electives spanning data mining to marketing to neuroscience.
One of the required courses will be “Big Data, Big Responsibilities: Toward Accountable Artificial Intelligence,” an ethics class.
“Foundations of Deep Learning” will be a new class in the statistics and data science department, giving students an introduction to the technical foundations of AI, Wharton professor Giles Hooker, an advisor for the new AI curriculum, told Business Insider by email. It will cover the technology underpinning the AI boom, including topics from “what is a neural network and how to train it” to “generative AI” to “efficient deep learning” to ensure students have “a solid conceptual grasp on what goes on under the hood in modern AI models,” according to the syllabus.
Wharton also updated the syllabi for existing classes, including the management course “Innovation, Change, and Entrepreneurship” and the marketing course “Introduction to Brain Science for Business.”
In a university press release announcing the changes, Eric Bradlow, the vice dean of AI and Analytics at Wharton, said, “We are at a critical turning point where practical AI knowledge is urgently needed.”
“Companies are struggling to recruit talent with the necessary AI skills, students are eager to deepen their understanding of the subject and gain hands-on experience, and our faculty’s expertise on the adoption and human impact of AI is unmatched,” he said.
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The intersection of AI and business
Wharton faculty began discussing a new AI curriculum last year, Hooker told BI.
In May 2024, Wharton launched the AI and Analytics Initiative to study possible changes to its curriculum, invest in new research, collaborate more with industries, and create open-source generative AI resources, according to Penn Today, the university’s official news site.
Through the initiative, Wharton has launched the AI Research Fund to help faculty pursue research at the intersection of AI and business and the Education Innovation Fund to help faculty adopt AI in the classroom.
The initiative was also used to provide ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to all full-time and executive MBA students starting in the fall of 2024 — a first-of-its-kind collaboration between a business school and OpenAI.
In January, Wharton unveiled the Accountable AI Lab, which will produce research on AI governance, regulation, and ethics with a “practical focus on business applications.”
Wharton therefore had several building blocks in place for a new curriculum, Hooker told BI. “A lot of what we had to do was to work out how to structure a useful and coherent path through what we offered and then see if there was anything we really needed to add,” he said.
Students who graduate with an AI focus will ideally be adept in four areas, Hooker said. They’ll have a strong technical knowledge of AI to assess the design and application of AI models in a business and be informed enough to keep up with new AI developments. They’ll have a sense of how AI will impact business operations. They’ll also have a handle on the ethics of data and automated decision-making and understand the legal frameworks governing AI.
Companies these days are hiring candidates who specialize in just one of these areas. For example, a company might hire an AI researcher to train large language models, a learning and development expert to teach teams how to use the technology or a lawyer who understands data privacy and regulations.
But graduates of Wharton’s new program may emerge as a jack-of-all-AI-trades. Their skill sets will be tailored to a future workplace where adaptability might be more valuable than specialization.
“We expect the impact of AI on business to be long and deep. Even without new breakthroughs in human-like reasoning, we can expect AI methods to penetrate even further into business processes and our lives,” Hooker said. “The careers and job titles associated with its penetration into business haven’t yet been fixed.”
