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ASU Leads AI Integration in Academia with OpenAI Partnership

ASU announced its collaboration with OpenAI in January, setting a precedent for how the university will implement artificial intelligence (AI) and large language learning models into teaching, learning, and research while building on ASU’s commitment to exploring AI in all forms. As the first institute of higher education to collaborate with the research and development company behind ChatGPT, the university was provided with a private ChatGPT instance—a more secure, separate version of the large language model from the public version. ASU faculty and staff also had the unique opportunity to submit proposals to the AI Innovation Challenge to leverage ChatGPT Enterprise in their work and research.

The university received more than 175 proposals in the first round of applications, accepted 105, and issued more than 800 ChatGPT Enterprise licenses to employees from 14 of ASU’s 17 schools, colleges, enterprise units, and teams. ASU selected six proposals from W. P. Carey employees.

During a W. P. Carey “Coffee, Tea, and ChatGPT” series event, which brought university employees together to discuss generative AI and ChatGPT’s impact on teaching and learning, six W. P. Carey license recipients shared how they’re using the technology in supply chain, economics, business, and information systems (IS) to investigate risk-sensing, collect exclusions of non-generally accepted accounting principles (non-GAAP), conduct commodity strategic analysis, avoid decision-making biases, and develop AI’s applications in curriculum, teaching, learning, and the student experience.

Six W. P. Carey ChatGPT Enterprise license recipients

1
Jason Nichols, clinical professor and assistant chair of IS, and Pei-yu “Sharon” Chen, IS chair and Red Avenue Foundation Professor, are using ChatGPT Enterprise to help students practice requirement gathering—or defining project needs and goals—in project management by simulating stakeholder conversation. They hope to use the technology to create a project management support application for graduate students.
2
Associate Professor of Supply Chain Management Yimin Wang’s proposal focuses on using contextual data to predict supply chain risk and investigate how certain regulatory stipulations could affect the global supply chain.
3
Professor of Supply Chain Management Thomas Kull is using his license to assist with a federal grant from the U.S. Department of Homeland Security (DHS) by creating a generative pretraining transformer (GPT) to help DHS specialists identify what to look for in a supply base to ensure its resiliency.
4
Clinical Associate Professor of Economics Patricia Ramirez De La Vina is focusing on investigating AI-enhanced pedagogy to improve economics education, particularly for online learners, to increase student engagement, concept comprehension, and efficiency.
5
Associate Professor of Accountancy Kimball Chapman is investigating non-GAAP exclusion collection.
6
Professor of Information Systems Hong Guo is using her license to investigate, analyze, and combat ChatGPT’s decision-making bias.
“The projects exemplify how license recipients implement principled innovation, the newest ASU design aspiration, into their teaching and research to create positive change through business, data, and technology,” says Associate Dean for Teaching and Learning, Clinical Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship, and College Catalyst for Principled Innovation Dan Gruber.

The AI Innovation Challenge continues to accept license proposals from university faculty, staff, and students on a semester basis. The W. P. Carey Marketing and Communications Department was accepted into the challenge in May. The team of 20-plus is using ChatGPT Enterprise to enhance market analysis, content creation, and project management.