Alpha Square Group Powers Next-Gen AI Education at the Johnson School
(Photo by Simon Wheeler)
A gift from Alpha Square Group will support data science and applied artificial intelligence (AI) in the Samuel Curtis Johnson Graduate School of Management at the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business. The gift will fund faculty curriculum awards, research assistantships, and new AI research and teaching initiatives, among other activities related to the application of AI to business.
“Artificial intelligence is becoming essential to all businesses, regardless of industry, and preparing our students for this environment has great urgency,” said Vishal Gaur, Anne and Elmer Lindseth Dean of the Johnson School. “I extend sincere thanks to Alpha Square Group and Renee Li for advancing our work in this space.”
Renee Li MBA ’24, CEO of Alpha Square Group, said, “I received a lot of love and care from the Johnson School and my EMBA classmates. This is definitely the right time for me to give back to the school and help others make their AI dreams come true.”
Li said AI is at a turning point for all industries and shared that ASG’s technology investments focus on next-generation digital solutions with a strong emphasis on AI innovation. Partnering with Johnson reflects ASG’s vision to empower future business leaders to harness AI’s potential.
The gift will spur the creation of new curricular content and shared resources across all programs, from marketing and operations to finance and economics. This year, a postdoctoral fellow will receive support to investigate the intersection of AI and human decision-making in business. The school will also continue to bring industry experts to campus to participate in educational programs.
The gift builds on an existing AI initiative at the Johnson School and broad work in AI across the SC Johnson College of Business.
MBA students are already exploring the potential of AI in business. With Sachin Gupta, Henrietta Johnson Lewis Professor of Management, and Emaad Manzoor, assistant professor of marketing and management communications, they build tools to convert unstructured text data from online reviews and chatter on social media into quantifiable variables that can be used in marketing models; with Ori Heffetz, professor of strategy and business economics, they are starting to learn how to interpret macroeconomic data with AI; and in other courses, they consider the ethics and morality of AI-generated business decisions.
The new Alpha Square Group Fund for Data Science and Applied AI expands experiences like these, whether in the classroom or the research arena.
“This gift empowers faculty to innovate in their classrooms, their research, and beyond by thinking outside the box and building on each other’s work,” said Andrew Karolyi, Charles Field Knight Dean of the SC Johnson College. “I’m so grateful to Renee Li and Alpha Square Group for expanding the college’s AI expertise.”