Gies Business recently hosted its first AI for Impact Challenge, a high-stakes proving ground for demonstrating how students can innovate, compete, and address real-world business problems.
The intensive 24-hour “build-a-thon” attracted 72 undergraduate and advanced degree students who formed teams to create agentic AI solutions alongside industry mentors. The goal was to move beyond theory and into process automation, creating complex tools that combine human strengths with AI strengths to get better results.
"The question facing Gies Business is not whether we should integrate AI and LLMs into the curriculum but how to accomplish it in a way that goes beyond theory to create leaders who can confidently ‘build to learn and learn to build’ sophisticated AI-driven tools,” said Vishal Sachdev, clinical associate professor of business administration at Gies Business and co-organizer of the event. The build-a-thon was sponsored by Agentic AI, an RSO, and the Gies Business Disruption Lab, which offers experiential learning opportunities with disruptive technologies.
Moving Beyond the Chatbot
While many students initially view AI through the lens of a simple chatbot interface, the challenge prompted orchestration of a more sophisticated "systems thinking" approach. Participants were encouraged to use low-code and no-code tools to build agentic workflows –systems that act autonomously based on specific business triggers.
"We want students to get exposed to models where they see AI as a way of getting tasks done," said Sachdev (right). "We moved the focus beyond chatbots, because they are no longer the major way you create value with AI.”
Adam King, co-organizer and director of innovation & transformation at Gies Business, said they chose this approach because it prepares students for the exact types of challenges they will face in their first jobs and throughout their careers.
"It’s less about deep specialization and more about framing the right problem for a specific scenario and creating a solution that works using real enterprise tools," King said. "These agentic workflows help frame business problems as a system problem."
Real-World Impact: Operational Efficiency
The AI for Impact Challenge focused on the operational underpinnings of business – areas like finance, HR, and marketing – to mimic the diverse working environments students will enter. The College looked no further than their own departments for this inaugural build-a-thon.
1st Place (Operations): Developed for the Magelli Office of Experiential Learning at Gies, this tool automates how it finds potential consulting clients. By “reading job postings backwards," Magelli Scout identifies signals – such as a company hiring its first Director of Revenue Operations – to flag consulting opportunities before they become public. This tool is already at work for the College and being developed further this summer
“Every job posting is a company publicly broadcasting what they can’t do,” said team member Prateek Verma (MSBA ’26). “A director of revenue operations posting doesn’t just mean they’re hiring; it means they have no revenue process today. That’s a consulting brief hiding in plain sight,”
2nd Place (HR track): HireFlow, a multi-agent hiring evaluation system, eliminates scoring drift in Gies Business recruitment. The hiring manager defines a custom rubric: the agent then scores resumes and CVs against levels of responsibility, ingests interview transcripts, scores candidates against historical admission data, and aggregates rounds into one auditable decision.
3rd Place (Marketing & Sales track): This sophisticated solution tackled a Gies marketing & communications challenge: running multiple paid campaigns simultaneously, each with unique budgets, timelines, channels, and creative requirements. The agentic system unifies intake, asset coordination, performance tracking, and stakeholder reporting into a single, orchestrated workflow.
4th Place (General Innovation track): This team built a four-agent system that transforms a student’s profile into personalized career recommendations, skill gap insights with targeted learning plans, and a tailored job-search roadmap – including visa-aware guidance for international students.
5th place (Finance & Accounting track): EVA evaluates how well innovation projects align with company strategy and budget efficiency. The student team managed to transform what used to be a tedious, four-hour manual review for a CFO into a seamless, two-minute automated workflow.
“In under 24 hours, we built something that thinks like a CFO and moves faster than one,” said Xinying Fu (MSA ’25), a team member who is now pursuing her PhD in accounting at Gies.
A Strategic Feedback Loop
The build-a-thon is a key component of the overall strategy to create an AI-driven educational ecosystem at Gies Business. By involving staff as “problem champions,” Gies Business is sparking innovation from the bottom up.
"We want to create a feedback loop where students learn by building and staff get motivated to embrace AI once they see what students can deliver," Sachdev said.
“It’s a way for them to get ideas and give feedback right away,” said King (right). “We hope this event becomes a catalyzing event that inspires both staff and students.”
Lindsey Savoie Halfar, Gies Business’ director of marketing, said she wanted to participate because it was an opportunity to support Gies Business students while also exploring how AI could help solve operational challenges her team faces every day.
“Some of our workflows involve a significant amount of manual coordination, data input, deadline tracking, and reporting across multiple campaigns and platforms,” said Halfar, who championed the Marcom project. “The solutions they presented were thoughtful, practical, and genuinely applicable to our day-to-day operations. It was exciting to see how quickly they could turn a complex business challenge into something that could create real operational efficiency.”
As Gies continues to roll out its new fully online Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBAi), events like the AI for Impact Challenge ensure that students aren't just entering an AI-driven workforce – they are ready to become the next generation of AI-savvy business leaders.
Learn more about the students and staff champions of the winning solutions from the build-a-thon’s impact report.
AI FOR IMPACT BY THE NUMBERS
- 72 Students participants
- 22 Completed agentic AI systems delivered
- 24 Continuous hours of building
- 5 Core business tracks: Finance, HR, Marketing, Operations, and General Innovation