Content

The advent of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) has received great attention in business and society due to its capabilities of content creation or decision making. Individuals started rapidly to use the capabilities of tools like ChatGPT and Google Gemini for text and image generation, personal recommendations, or decision support. At the same time, organizations are challenged to leverage GenAI but also AI technology in general within their business models, processes, and information systems. (Gen)AI technologies enable executing cognitive tasks which in the past were carried out manually by organizations’ employees. Ultimately, this leads to an increase of automation in organizations. For example, organizations can automate the creation of customer service responses, contract document reviewing in legal departments, application screening in human resources, or fraud detection in financial transactions.

This digital transformation process to higher levels of automation must be managed by organizations. While the goal is to free up capacity of employees from simple repetitive tasks for more complex ones, improce efficiency and extend innovation capabilities, organizations also must consider social and ethical aspects when implementing automation. Thus, a (Gen)AI integration strategy that benefits organizations must consider many facets, e.g., strategic objectives, business model adaptation, governance and risk management, implementation project portfolio management, and change management.
Summarizing, this course will teach concepts to support organizations and their employees to increase the level of automation leveraging (Gen)AI technologies under consideration of an economic and social perspective.

This course consists of the following major building blocks:

-        Introduction to (Gen)AI concepts and technology.

-        Overview of history and key concepts of automation in organizations.

-        Organizational perspective on integrating (Gen)AI.

-        Individual perspective on integrating (Gen)AI capabilities.

-        Challenges and countermeasures to secure the integration of (Gen)AI capabilities into organizations from a socio-economic perspective.

The course is complemented with quizzes for knowledge recapture and hands-on activities in which the students apply the lecture content and implement the integration of (generative) AI capabilities in organizational processes and structures based on real-world case studies to increase organizational automation.

Learning goals

As a result of attending this program, students will be able to:

-        describe key concepts of (Gen)AI technologies enabling the increase of automation in organizations.

-        understand the historical evolution and describe core concepts of automation to drive organizational efficiency and innovation.

-        articulate (Gen)AI integration principles for effectively implementing automation in organizations.

-        explore and prototype (Gen)AI-based applications to streamline individual tasks and workflows in the context of organizational automation.

-        analyze best practices for addressing challenges to ensure adoption of (Gen)AI capabilities for organizational automation from a socio-economic perspective..

Prerequisites

No specific prerequisites are required for the lecture.