The Business of AI - Platforms, Models, Applications, and Impact 5 credits

The course builds your understanding of AI from a business perspective, showing how it can be leveraged to enhance organisational efficiency and effectiveness. It introduces you to the technological platforms that underpin contemporary organisations, giving you a shared foundation for understanding how AI interacts with data systems and digital infrastructures. You will learn both about AI as a technology – what it is and which types of AI are currently used in organisations – but also how to work with organisational data, assess its suitability for different purposes, and apply AI tools in practice to support decision-making and value creation. Through the course content, you will develop a deeper understanding of AI in the context of firms and organisations, with a particular focus on data and value-creating processes. You will explore the basics of AI from a managerial perspective, including how different types of AI function and which applications are currently applied across industries. Special emphasis is placed on understanding different data sources within companies and how AI improves firms’ abilities to generate value from existing data by enhancing and supporting organisational processes. You will gain an overview of the role enterprise systems and data lakes play in shaping data availability and quality. Exploring how systems can differ in terms of structure, reliability, and analytical potential you will learn to evaluate their usefulness for AI-driven decision-making. At the end of the course, you will have developed an understanding of what defines and supports “cognitive”, data-driven organisations. You will be prepared to evaluate AI’s strategic relevance for various business functions and identify opportunities to translate organisational data into improvement actions.