At Indiana Kelley, ‘AI Is,’ Not ‘AI Will’

Latest in a series featuring short interviews with faculty at various B-schools focused on the use of AI in business and business education. See also Training Students To Leverage Increased Cognition (Michigan Ross), Rebuilding The Role Play (Kellogg), Learning Requires Friction (Wharton), The Deck Is Dead (Stanford), and We Teach MBAs To Apologize About The Best Tool They Have (INSEAD).

I grew up in Bloomington, Indiana, home to IU’s Kelley School of Business. Bloomington sits just outside John Mellencamp’s small town and isn’t much larger itself.

Nestled in the rolling hills of southern Indiana, Bloomington produced the limestone that built much of Washington, D.C. It also produced brains, at Indiana University, where I’d trek late at night to a PLATO terminal.

PLATO was an early computer teaching system, my IU terminal connected to UI Urbana-Champaign, where the tech was invented. Giant terminals with pioneering plasma touch panels (PLATO invented both technologies, and EdTech itself) that changed not only how computers teach but inspired much of the modern web.

Kelley is a very good school, but it doesn’t have Stanford’s geography, sitting at the literal end of Sand Hill Road, or Harvard’s name, which every person on Earth knows. The computer science department that trained me is fantastic, but it doesn’t have a pipeline of AI researchers with billions in infrastructure to play with.

What Kelley has is a dean who sent one email, one evening, realizing a seismic eruption in the price of cognition had just changed everything.

I’ve been writing a series on how business schools are navigating AI in education, from Stanford to Wharton to Kellogg to Harvard to Ross. One thing I keep finding: the schools moving fastest have leaders who decided this wasn’t optional. At Kelley, that decision had a date: June 6th.

Kelley is also bigger than most people realize. Over 400 teaching faculty at the Bloomington campus alone, nearly 600 combined with Indianapolis, delivering over 4,300 course sections to roughly 13,000 students a year. Retooling that is not a small project, as Brad Wheeler, advisor to the dean for technology and innovation and director, of the Kelley Data Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab, explains.

Poets&Quants: Kelley made a foundational decision early on that AI wouldn’t be anyone’s specialty. Can you explain that?

Brad Wheeler: About three years ago, the dean’s office made a call: we’re not going to have an AI major or a separate AI thing. AI is like math. It’s everywhere. It’s going to be in accounting, in finance, in information systems. So, we nipped in the bud the idea that one group would build an AI major and that would be our checkbox.

That led to the creation of the Virtual Advanced Business Technologies department. Faculty have their home department, you’re tenured in finance or whatever, but this was a horizontal layer across all departments where AI-interested faculty could opt in. We have 125 faculty in it today. It’s been a real accelerant for sharing. Somebody tries something, reads something, learns something with a student, and it moves.

We didn’t call it the virtual AI department deliberately. Lots of technologies are going to come and go. AI is certainly the most important of the moment, but we wanted a structure that could absorb what comes next.

P&Q: Then something shifted about a year ago.

Wheeler: June 6th. Pat Hopkins had been dean about two months. He sent an email one night to four of us. The message: stop saying AI will. It’s AI is. This is happening right now.

That was the starter pistol. We’ve been running hard ever since. We built a 30-item AI tactical action plan and executed against it. We enrolled every faculty member, staff member, and student in a Gen AI 101 course, creating a common baseline instantly. Nine required credit hours of AI-integrated coursework are now mandatory for all Kelley majors starting this fall.

P&Q: That Gen AI 101 course is being shared beyond Kelley?

Wheeler: The university directly asked Kelley to create it. It was built in about eight weeks last July and August, then rolled out. Basic prompt engineering, how to write a good prompt, how to assess what’s coming back. It’s being completely reinvented right now and will roll out again to all faculty and students at Indiana University without fee in August. We’ve shared a lot of what we’ve built broadly. The campus keeps asking us to do certain things we’re already good at, and we share them back.

P&Q: Faculty adoption is where a lot of schools get stuck. How did Kelley move them?

Wheeler: A few things. We wrote the Kelley AI Playbook, anchored in our values. It’s guidance to faculty, not a rule book. It’s public, at kelly.iu.edu, with a Creative Commons license so others can reuse and repurpose it. That helped faculty understand the lay of the land and make decisions about their own courses.

We’ve also been producing a series called Kelley AI Moments, short demonstrations of AI in practice. I had someone use AI to write an entire MBA teaching case, the assignment, and the grading rubric, then used it in a workflow to provide student feedback on real MBA submissions. Full SEC financials, a deteriorating margin situation woven into the numbers. Stuff like that circulates and builds momentum.

But the real story is the dean. Pat put out an invitation to a course development workshop, seven hours, no incentives. Just: come and work on your course. Over 120 faculty showed up the week after grades were done, when faculty are thinking about summer. We already have 72 scheduled for the next one in July.

P&Q: You’ve also built something called the Kelley Koach?

Wheeler: The Kelley Course Koach, spelled with a K. It’s an internal AI tool connected to all of a faculty member’s past courses, their syllabi, assignments, rubrics, and teaching evaluations. A professor goes in and says I want to redo this MBA course for next fall, and it walks them through an audit. One of the questions it asked me: if your students used AI to outsource assignment one, what skill would they be missing to do assignment three? It works through pedagogical design at that level of specificity. We’ve had over a hundred faculty go through course audits with it. It’s private, personalized, and we see it as a key way faculty reinvent their courses for a world where the artifact economy has collapsed.

P&Q: The artifact economy?

Wheeler: There was a good piece in Inside Higher Ed in February about this. The old model: you write a teaching case or an assignment, the student produces an artifact back, you write comments on it, they give you another artifact. That whole cycle breaks down when a smart machine spews out words in abundance. So we’re having to reinvent, course by course, faculty by faculty, what it means to assess learning. Game tapes. Understanding cognitive process. How did a student reach a certain point, not just what did they produce.

P&Q: Kelley has a reputation as a first mover. Is that fair?

Wheeler: More than 25 years ago we were the first traditional top-20 business school to launch an online MBA, when that was viewed as pretty tawdry. You think about the quality of the technologies in the late 90s and early 2000s. Kelley Direct has been the number one ranked online MBA most years since. A whole series of specialized master’s programs have spun off from that. There is a culture of innovation here, particularly around curriculum and programs. We see markets changing, we adapt our products assertively, and with a lot of faculty involved, it takes a culture to make that work.

P&Q: Any closing thought on where this goes?

Wheeler: The leadership journey is the story. Every school is on one. At Kelley, Pat has leaned in personally, consistently, using his own credibility and his own voice. He’s been at Kelley 30 years. He’s known and trusted. That’s had an enormous effect. You can have all the playbooks and course coaches and tactical plans you want. It starts with someone at the top who says this is now, not later, and means it.

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Michael Olenick, JD, is a former INSEAD research fellow and founder of VSTRAT.ai. He has spent four decades building AI and expert systems; his research has been used at INSEAD and, before then, cited by Congress and media on how to resolve the 2008 era financial crisis. Michael currently lives with his partner, Anastassia, in Austin, Texas.

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