More than 200 academic researchers and business professionals from across the country converged on The Ohio State University’s Columbus campus for the inaugural AI Business Conference earlier this month.
The theme of the two-day event was “Human-in-the-Loop AI: Enabling Responsible and Impactful Human-AI Collaboration.”
Presented by Ohio State’s Fisher College of Business at Pfahl Hall, the conference brought together students, faculty and staff with industry leaders to discuss how AI will impact education and the workforce in the future, said Fisher’s Interim Dean Aravind Chandrasekaran.
“The best thing is to learn more about what’s happening in the world of AI in research, what’s happening in practice and how do we coexist [with the technology] because things are changing so fast,” he said. “It’s important for us to understand what’s happening and to collaborate with partners.”
In his opening remarks, Ohio State Executive Vice President and Provost Ravi V. Bellamkonda said the conference advances the university’s AI Fluency initiative. Starting this year, the initiative embeds AI education into the undergraduate curriculum, preparing students to use AI tools, as well as understand, question and innovate with them.
“At Ohio State, the hypothesis we’re exploring is that the people who will thrive and reach their full potential will come from ‘bilingual’ people,” he said.
“Fundamental to realizing the potential of AI is having some deep understanding of the domain, whether it’s health or business, political science or literature. The idea of bilingualism is that you have people who are domain experts but also fluent in AI. So that’s the hypothesis informing all the things we do, including the AI Fluency initiative.”
Ohio State is a leader among universities that are using AI to streamline operations and make programs and services more accessible to students and the wider community, said Mary Strain, who leads Amazon Web Services’ strategy for AI and machine learning in the U.S. public sector, in her keynote address.
“Ohio State was looking to mitigate and meet compliance standards for PDF documents. Those compliance standards are coming down [from the federal government] in April of 2026 that require all PDFs to be accessible according to these new standards,” she said. “[Ohio State] worked with our cloud innovation center … and generated an open-source solution that dozens and dozens of universities are using now.”
Universities have the capacity to train students not only on how to use AI, but how to tap into their own brain power to check for errors among the data that generative AI produces, said Anindya Ghose, professor of technology and marketing at New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business, in his keynote address.
Pairing AI fluency with critical thinking will make students more competitive when they enter the workforce, he said.
“AI is affecting jobs,” he said. “It is affecting jobs for the youngest people.”
During a panel discussion with industry professionals, Susan White, Ohio State Wexner Medical Center’s chief data and analytics officer, said the center recently implemented an AI tool known as ambient listening. The tool creates secure, confidential records of patient information, freeing up medical professionals to fully engage with patients during doctor visits, she said.
“We found that it had a tremendous amount of savings on the physician side, their cognitive load. … Also, there was more eye contact with the physician and the patient,” she said. “The physician wasn’t typing [notes], they were listening, and that has value. There’s tangible value in minutes saved per doctor, but there’s also intangible value in that the patient’s more satisfied.”
The AI conference also featured presentations by Ohio State students, faculty and staff and representatives from universities nationwide about AI research that aims to enhance education while addressing ethical concerns. During the closing session, Erin McKie, assistant professor of operations and business analytics at Fisher, received the Best Presentation Award in the Junior Faculty category.
As the use of AI expands in nearly every sector of society, Fisher plans to continue to address opportunities and challenges that the constantly evolving technology presents, Chandrasekaran said.
“This conference is about coming together and understanding these problems – not through one lens, but through multiple lenses,” he said. “This is a start. We hope to continue this every year.”