Course Overview

Generative AI (GenAI) stands at the forefront of a technological revolution, poised to redefine how businesses operate and deliver value. This course delves into critical questions at the heart of this transformation: How will GenAI reshape modern enterprise? What strategies should businesses adopt to integrate this technology effectively? How can existing data be leveraged to unlock new opportunities? What are the ethical and regulatory issues to consider?

These questions are pivotal whether you aspire to be a corporate innovator driving AI initiatives or a startup founder focused on the burgeoning GenAI market. Understanding the complexities of GenAI goes beyond using ChatGPT-type applications and prompt engineering. It requires immersive engagement in building with the technology, putting oneself in the decision-maker's shoes, and grappling with how GenAI can solve business challenges and opportunities.

This course offers an active learning environment where you will explore these questions through hands-on experience, directly linking conceptual understanding to business use cases. Whether you are a GenAI novice or possess some technical knowledge, this course is designed to enrich your understanding and prepare you for leadership in the GenAI-driven business landscape. You don’t need to know coding to take this class.

Educational Objectives

Our goal in this course is to deep dive into how Generative AI technology is driving rapid change across industries, companies, and business functions. We will examine this in a few different ways:

• Gain a good understanding of the technology and how it works. You'll do this by build a production scale Gen AI application using a no code platform. The HBS digital transformation (DTX) team will assist in the delivery fot he project.
• Learn about the basic foundations of the technology as well as the latest developments such as agentic applications, etc.
• A strategic focus on how Gen AI has the potential to disrupt business models. How can businesses improve productivity and efficiency using Gen AI? How can businesses innovate using gen AI?
• How are business functions changing because of Gen AI? We'll focus on marketing, consulting, R&D, etc.
• Gen AI is influencing a wide range of industries. We'll identify drivers of change across a range of industries (e.g., professional services, news media, education, advertising, software, and healthcare).
• Governance of Gen AI, risk management, responsible and ethical AI issues.
• Implications for Start-Ups and early stage investors. How to build and scale a Gen AI start-up and how to develop an investment thesis (whether as a VC or as a founder) for an early stage company.
• Emerging trends, ecosystems, and shifts poised to shape the next era of generative AI.
• The cases and protagonists are selected to highlight how organizations are using Gen-AI to boost efficiency, personalization, and innovation. These include large companies and start-ups.

Hands-on Projects

You will do a project designed to give you hands-on practice in learning how the technology works and how to build applications. The project is geared to proving you the capabilities to become an effective Gen AI product manager. You'll also do assignments geared to giving you the tools to do any professional work better and faster using the latest Gen AI tools. The final course project will allow you to apply the learnings from the course in a comprehensive setting to analyze the impact of Gen AI for a company or business function.

You will have access to HBS Enterprise GPT account and no code Gen AI builder tools for the course project.

Classroom Conduct and Grading Guidelines

• I expect full attendance by all students in all sessions. We only have 12 sessions for a packed agenda of content.
• The grading distribution is as follows:

Grading:

• 50% class participation
• 50% project
• The use of generative AI is not just encouraged but required for class preparation and all class assignments.

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