You’ll often find Gies College of Business professor Nathan Yang building a fully functioning interactive web app during a live lecture – a process that takes him about five minutes. Far from a simple flex, it’s the latest example of how Gies Business faculty are engaging students in AI-powered classrooms.
“AI is a creativity enabler; there’s no technical limit now,” said Yang, associate professor of business administration at Gies Business. “A faculty member can develop whatever they need in order to convey the point they want to make. For me, AI is an ability enhancer that expands the scope of what I’m capable of doing in the classroom.”
Turning data into play
Yang's approach reflects a broader philosophy taking shape across Gies Business. As AI becomes part of nearly every business function, it’s not enough to simply teach students how to use a specific AI tool. Instead, faculty like Yang are designing learning experiences that help students ask better questions, evaluate AI-generated insights, and develop the judgment needed to make decisions in environments where people and AI increasingly work together.
To engage undergraduate students, Yang often turns to AI to gamify some of his classroom exercises.
“AI is insanely good at developing games – all you need is an idea,” said Yang. “It works best as a creativity enabler rather than just a time-saving productivity tool.”
To teach the link between site selection and business performance in his undergraduate marketing research course (BADM 322), Yang transformed existing retail data and predictive models on taco sales into a scavenger hunt built with AI assistant Claude. Students research cities for new Chipotle locations and receive projected revenues based on real demographic data before submitting their single city choice for a grade. The student with the best projected return receives a gift card.
Spotting confabulation, data poisoning, and ghost data
For students taking his digital marketing strategy & analytics course (MBA 542) in Gies’ fully online MBA – the iMBA® – Yang shifts the digital marketing focus from technical coding to strategic managerial insights.
“AI is potentially a much stronger scrutinizer than humans; we have limited bandwidth,” said Yang, who demystifies AI by having learners use it to analyze massive data sets during fast-paced, 10-minute breakout sessions.
"We focus a lot more on the important stuff – getting to understand the concepts,” said Souriya Khaosanga, Gies iMBA student and co-founder of Chainable Fintech, Portland. “Watching him deploy apps live is very inspiring."
Yang teaches students to understand the limits of how AI tools gather information and challenge their outputs. They learn to identify AI hallucinations and confabulations (plausible-sounding but factually wrong answers), ghost data (AI errors) as well as data poisoning (when bad actors intentionally feed corrupt or biased data into an AI model’s training). Learning modules also teach students how to use multiple AI systems as adversaries to verify information and avoid single-source bias.
"The module on data poisoning had the biggest impact on me,” said Austin Witherspoon, a Gies iMBA student and founder of Wongoji.com. “I used to think of data as something you just mine for insights. Now I know you have to question whether it's legitimate before you trust it at all."
GEO vs. gut instincts
Yang believes human intuition and unique perspectives will become even more critical as AI adoption standardizes corporate decision-making.
For years, digital marketing revolved around Search Engine Optimization (SEO) – gaming Google’s algorithms to land on page one. Today, the landscape is shifting toward Generative Engine Optimization (GEO), which structures content so AI answer engines like ChatGPT or Claude synthesize, cite, and recommend your data first. This shift from SEO to GEO represents a fundamental change in how content is optimized for discovery.
“With GEO, you’re no longer writing just for human readers,” said Yang. “You’re writing for the AI bots scraping the web to build their datasets.”
But that shift comes with a hidden risk. If every company relies on the same platforms and synthetic insights, it can lead to everyone making the same mistakes.
To combat that sameness, Yang challenges his Gies students to give their gut feelings a bigger seat at the table. In a world where anyone can prompt an AI to spit out a safe, consensus answer, Yang believes true business leadership requires human perspective, lived experience, and the courage to deviate from the prompt.
“AI is a powerful tool, but your superpower is your own life path – the unique context that AI doesn’t have access to,” said Yang. “Sometimes, your gut instinct is the exact thing needed to break away from the collective and make a truly great strategic move.”
You can view a sample of Professor Yang’s AI-created interactive teaching tools here.