‘What Does This Actually Do For Students?’ Indiana Kelley’s Brian Williams Is P&Q’s 2026 Business Professor Of The Year

Before starting a lesson, the accounting professor may first open his closet where he keeps an Einstein wig, a Sherlock Holmes hat, and an Indiana University football helmet.

He eats an apple to keep the microphone from picking up mouth clicks. He may sit in front of that microphone for five hours, talking through take after take with an animated AI avatar, for what will turn out to be a two-minute video. And after all that, the professor may still get second billing to the robot.

“There’s no line on a CV for any of that,” says Amy Kinser, executive director for teaching and learning in the Office of the Dean at Indiana University’s Kelley School of Business.

Kinser is also deputy chair of Kelley’s Virtual Advanced Business Technologies Department (vABT), a sprawling interdisciplinary academic unit created to at least try to keep pace with the sweeping technology changes transforming business and business education. She works closely with Brian Williams, the accounting professor who has become the on-screen sidekick to Crimson, GenAI 101’s animated AI co-teacher.

Once, while building a course presentation, Kinser put Crimson prominently at the top of a slide and listed Williams underneath: “and also Brian Williams.”

That was the part he loved.

“He’d rather give the billing to the robot and the production team than keep it for himself,” Kinser says. “I’ve been teaching since 1997, and I’ve never worked with anyone like him.

“In every meeting I’ve ever been in with Brian, he asks the same question: ‘What does this actually do for students?’”

P&Q’s 2026 BUSINESS PROFESSOR OF THE YEAR

This fall, Williams and Crimson will teach GenAI 101 about 4,000 Kelley freshmen GenAI 101, a newly expanded, credit-bearing version of the generative AI course Williams launched last year. He’ll get the same 4,000 students again in the spring for 201: AI Skills in Business. Kelley has made both courses permanent graduation requirements, supported by an army of 60 teaching assistants.

Outside those classes, the course has become a striking example of democratizing education. Previous iterations have reached about 117,000 IU students, faculty, staff, and alumni. Another 11,605 people have taken the free public version. Pfizer has made Williams’ course part of a worldwide AI certification program, while doctors at Indiana University Health are applying its lessons in medical research and clinical leadership.

For building an AI course with extraordinary reach inside Kelley and beyond, and for helping drive one of the more ambitious rethinks of AI education at a major business school, Brian Williams is Poets&Quants’ Business Professor of the Year.

“It’s just really cool to see the impact it has had for students and for just people generally,” says Williams, Sam Frumer Professor of Accounting, chair of Kelley’s vABT Department, and one of P&Q’s 50 Best Undergraduate Professors of 2024.

“I’m grateful to see it having that impact at scale.”

‘A REALLY WORTHWHILE LIFE’

Williams did not grow up dreaming of becoming a business professor. When he enrolled at Texas A&M University as an accounting major, he planned to earn his degree in four years and get a job as quickly as possible.

At A&M, he met professors who invested their time and encouraged him. One asked if he thought about pursuing a PhD. At the time, Williams wasn’t even thinking about a master’s degree.

“But I thought, if I could have half the impact on even just a few students that these professors have had on me, that would be a really worthwhile life,” Williams tells P&Q.

Williams first joined Kelley in 2015, and that question of impact still guides his teaching. “How will this benefit students?” he asks before designing a video lesson or classroom assignment. Sometimes that means making the work hard because struggling through it is where the learning happens.

At the end of some courses, Williams devotes about 30 minutes to lessons that won’t appear on any accounting exam. He talks about friendship, time, the finite number of hours people get with those they love, and the regrets people describe near the end of their lives.

Students have told him it was among the most meaningful lectures of their college careers.

Williams has a gift for figuring out what learners misunderstand about a complicated subject, then finding a simple, low-stakes example that gets them through the door, says Patrick Hopkins, dean of the Kelley School. He does it for first-year students and experienced executives alike.

“Many top instructors command one audience beautifully, maybe two: their students and their discipline-specific peers,” Hopkins tells P&Q.

“Brian’s strength rests in holding the attention of a wide range of audiences, often within the same class session, while making every single person feel like they belong. This is a much rarer skill than most people realize, and it’s a significant part of why people respond so deeply to his teaching.”

THEN CAME AI

When OpenAI released ChatGPT in November 2022, business schools were all but forced to confront how artificial intelligence would reshape work, classrooms, and entire industries.

Hopkins was already thinking about how fast technology was changing business. By 2023, Kelley had made a strategic decision that AI should be integrated across every business discipline, and a year later launched its Virtual Advanced Business Technologies Department. Williams is its founding chair.

Kelley deliberately did not create an AI department. It wanted something that could survive whatever technology came next without siloing innovation. AI is changing marketing differently than accounting or cybersecurity. Finance professors are bringing new questions about investment and return. The idea was to bring those perspectives together in a whole-school approach.

What started with 30 founding faculty has since grown to about 120 members with joint appointments across every Kelley academic department. A recent curriculum audit found that 565 Kelley courses now integrate material around employable AI skills, up from 367 in the spring, up from 367 in the spring.

Then, in 2025, IU President Pamela Whitten asked Williams to build a practical, workforce-focused generative AI course that could scale across the university. Employers were already delivering a blunt message to IU leaders: “Your students need these skills or we will not hire them.”

Williams launched GenAI 101 in 66 days.

The online, mostly asynchronous course looks like a polished YouTube series. In short, highly produced videos, Williams and Crimson — his animated, Pixar-esque co-teacher — walk learners through prompting, context, hallucinations, AI assistants, and the limits of large language models.

“There’s no theory,” Williams says. “It’s very much, you will learn this skill in this video.”

Kelley has since taken the bones of that course and turned them into two required courses for every undergraduate business student. Williams and Kelley’s production team have committed to updating the material every semester, an acknowledgment that an AI curriculum can become stale almost as soon as it is finished.

“What makes Brian’s work so compelling and engaging across a range of audiences is that, since he isn’t approaching these models through a computer science lens, he keeps his focus on the applied and the practical rather than the technical or theoretical. This is what allows his AI courses to function at scale,” Hopkins says.

“He is also profoundly future oriented, focusing always on the skills students will need a few years from now, on the changing expectations from employers, and on the research questions Kelley should be pursuing to stay ahead of the curve.”

The new credit-bearing course devotes four lessons to AI ethics, including environmental impacts, hallucinations, model alignment, and increasingly autonomous systems. Because business graduates will help decide where AI is deployed, what safeguards are in place, and which vendors get major contracts, business schools must teach the risks and downside of AI alongside the skills and benefits, Williams says.

“These systems are very powerful and there is a lot of risk around that,” he says. “Part of being a responsible user of AI is knowing when not to use it.”

AI, WHAT SHOULD I EAT?

To teach his CORE prompting framework — Context, Objective, Role, and Example — Williams asks students to imagine a foodie friend.

Ask, “What should I eat?” and the friend doesn’t have much to work with. But explain that you want breakfast-for-dinner for two adults and three kids, have a $25 budget, and only a pan and a toaster, and suddenly they can offer something useful.

AI works the same way.

“It has all the knowledge in the world, but it can’t read your mind. That one example changed how I write every prompt,” says Jacob Grossman, a 2026 graduate of Kelley’s Master of Science in Accounting with Data and Analytics.

Grossman first worked with Williams through a consulting project in Kelley’s master’s program, studying how other universities were approaching AI and evaluating tools for what would become GenAI 201. He later became the course’s first teaching assistant.

The foodie friend analogy captures Williams’ knack for making unfamiliar technology practical, Grossman says. It also reflects something deeper about his teaching.

“What stood out most was how seriously Brian took my ideas. It felt like a real collaboration,” Grossman says. “His message is that AI should be a thought partner you question and build on, and he treats people the same way. He wants you to push back and add your own thinking, not just follow along.”

Grossman was hardly an AI novice before GenAI 101. He used ChatGPT like everyone else, built an Excel training course with AI assistance, and worked with an AI and machine learning startup in Cape Town. But much of his experimentation was still trial and error.

Williams’ course gave him a more disciplined way to ask questions and check the answers — particularly important in accounting and finance, where a confident wrong answer can be worse than no answer at all.

For Grossman, the biggest shift he noticed after the course was learning to use AI as a tool for building. He recently launched DebtDrop, a debt-payoff app now available on Apple’s App Store. He is not a software engineer, but he used Claude to help write code, test the product, and work through Apple’s review process.

“Today, people are actually paying for it, which still feels a little surreal.”

IMPACT BEYOND KELLEY

Perhaps the broadest impact is happening beyond Kelley itself. Previous versions of GenAI 101 have reached about 117,000 IU students, faculty, staff, and alumni, making it perhaps the largest generative AI course in higher education. In April, the university opened it free to anyone.

Dr. Darren Caudill, service line leader for hospital medicine at Indiana University Health Physicians, was using AI like a glorified search engine. He wanted to see how the tool could help in both his clinical work and research.

Williams’ course demystified what he calls the “most paradigm-shifting technology of our time.”

“It was so transformative to my work as a physician leader that I encouraged my entire service line to take it as well as family, friends, and non-Indiana University colleagues when it was released to the world.”

His a-ha moment came during the problem-solving and brainstorming modules. He discovered how AI could be a sounding board for refining ideas whenever he needed one, particularly useful in healthcare leadership where high-level strategy discussions are tough to arrange.

Caudill, also an assistant professor of clinical medicine at IU School of Medicine, now uses AI to help analyze staffing challenges using historical data, admissions, discharges, and expected patient volume. The work informs decisions about where physicians and advanced practice providers may be needed.

The course also made him more cautious.

“His course made me think about the accuracy of AI and the importance of knowing that it can hallucinate answers,” Caudill says. “It is very important, especially in medicine, that the physician or provider maintain the ‘human in the loop’ to prevent a bad outcome.”

Companies are taking notice too.

Eli Lilly piloted IU’s course and, after strong feedback from participants and managers, decided to scale it across the company, according to Buu Le Lien, its vice president of human resources.

Pfizer has made Williams’ course part of the baseline for its AI fluency work. In June, the pharmaceutical giant rolled out an AI certification program across roles and functions worldwide, with the course as part of its foundational training. Pfizer says 98% of eligible colleagues have completed the first course, including CEO Albert Bourla.

THE HUMAN SIDE OF SCALE

For all that scale, Williams admits he misses the classroom.

Now, even the live sessions of GenAI are virtual, but students still stop him in the halls to talk about the course. A testament to the presence he has managed to create from the other side of a screen.

“The coolest ones are like, ‘This helped me get an internship,’ or ‘I was able to use this to get a return job offer,’” Williams says. “Those are the ones that are really rewarding.”

Those moments capture a central tension of Williams’ work.

He is teaching thousands of students at once about technology built to automate and scale human work at extraordinary speed. Yet his north star remains stubbornly individual.

A student is not a unit of enrollment. A student is a human being. And technology, no matter how powerful, matters only if it helps that person learn, think, work, and live a little better. It brings Williams back to the question he asks in all those meetings and before the marathon studio sessions.

What does this actually do for students?

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