Under pressure from their board members and investors, Canada’s business leaders are heading back to school this fall for a crash course in artificial intelligence.

Some of the country’s biggest business schools, including Western University’s Ivey and the University of Toronto’s Rotman, are offering courses for executives, directors and managers on generative AI and how to incorporate it in their operations. 

It’s a response to the sudden mass interest in tools like ChatGPT, which has sparked debate in the company’s boardrooms and C-suites over how the technology could help their businesses or harm them. 

“CEOs are freaking out a little bit about, ‘What does this mean to my organization? How do I respond?’” said Sanjeev Gill, associate vice-president of innovation at Watspeed, a continuing-education unit at the University of Waterloo. 

In response to that panic, UWaterloo cobbled together a three-part “executive sprint” specifically on ChatGPT. The 90-minute virtual sessions are designed to help senior executives learn the basics of large language models and how to use the technology to their advantage. 

Demand for the program—the first instance of which ran in May—was “off the charts,” said Gill. 

A few months before that, UWaterloo offered a ChatGPT webinar for business leaders that attracted 2,400 attendees. “We had to upgrade our Zoom licences to be able to support that many people,” Gill said. 

The university caps the executive sprints—the second of which it offered last month, with a third scheduled for November—at 40 people to give attendees a chance to ask questions and interact. 

Other schools have rolled out similar programs. Leslie Kellen, the director of operations at Toronto-based storage company XYZ Storage, enrolled in an series of executive AI workshops at Western University’s Ivey Academy this spring. His company had leaned on AI for about a decade, using it to manage and analyze data to help make better decisions, or using voice recognition to help route customer service calls. But with the buzz around generative AI this past year, Kellen wanted to know how it could help his storage company.

“We thought immediately, ‘How can this be added to our business?’” he said. “It wasn’t about cost-cutting, and it wasn’t about finding redundancies. It was about, ‘How do we continue to build a better business?’”

That question isn’t just something business leaders are asking themselves; boards of directors and investors have become fixated on how their companies are integrating generative AI and managing the threats and opportunities it presents. 

While conversations around the business case for AI have become breathless in the past year, Ajay Agrawal—founder of the Creative Destruction Lab, a startup accelerator program launched at U of T—said Rotman has been lecturing on the topic since 2015. 

At the time, Agrawal said, U of T’s computer-science students were looking for ways to turn their projects into businesses, but didn’t have the resources to do so. “We saw a lot of action in the startup world, but very little activity in the corporate world,” he said. He and his colleagues organized a conference to help corporate leaders navigate the growth of AI, and shortly thereafter began offering lectures on the topic to the university’s MBA students. 

Agrawal has since co-authored two books on the subject—Prediction Machines and Power and Prediction—with Joshua Gans and Avi Goldfarb in response to business interest in AI and machine learning, which he said has ebbed and flowed over the years. 

Corporate interest in AI waned during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said, as investments made a years earlier had failed to live up to their hype. ChatGPT’s launch late last year changed that. 

“When ChatGPT came along, it seemed like everybody changed their tune,” Agrawal said. “And now it’s not just the tech-forward CEOs—it’s everybody.”

On top of its MBA lectures, Rotman is also offering a three-part AI course for C-suite executives and their direct reports, in industries spanning banking, insurance, automotive, consulting, pharmaceuticals and electronics. 

During the in-person sessions, participants share their current AI strategies, and the instructors give feedback on how they can improve, using a framework Agrawal said can apply to a range of industries. 

As much as the course is about using AI in business, Agrawal said, it’s about training leaders to do what AI can’t: use their judgment. 

“AIs do prediction, but they don’t do any judgment. They’re just computational statistics,” he said. “So that means there’s still a very critical role for people on the judgment side.” 

Still, AI’s predictive capabilities have the power to wholly transform industries, said Agrawal, which means decision-makers may need to use their judgment to redesign businesses “from scratch.” 

Take an airport, for example: offering Gucci and Prada products to a middle-class clientele only works in a world where those customers are stuck waiting with nowhere to go and nothing to do but spend their money on things they wouldn’t otherwise buy. If predictive AI can fix scheduling challenges and eliminate long travel waits, the whole business of airports will have to be overhauled, said Agrawal.

The Ivey course likewise emphasizes the new factors business leaders have to consider when AI takes over certain tasks. “If those tasks do get automated by AI, where does the value-add come from?” said Fredrik Odegaard, an associate professor of management science at Western Ivey who teaches the executive AI course. “What do you do with that workforce? What types of opportunities does it open up for the organization to focus on?” 

That way of thinking was the biggest takeaway for Kellen, the storage facility director who participated in the Ivey course. “In this black box of AI, there are human decisions that are going to steer an organization in one direction or another,” he said. “And then you have to really be on top of that and not automate away the decision-making.”