The Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia is running an artificial intelligence pilot program called ChatSDG, and last week at the world’s largest business education conference, professors, deans and administrators from other business schools “agreed” to test it, Bloomberg reported.
ChatSDG evaluates the alignment of academic articles and journals with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which include everything from ending poverty to ensuring sustainable consumption. This alignment is necessary for business schools to gain accreditation from AACSB, an international organization founded in 1916. According to In fact, AACSB accreditation is one of the most rigorous and prestigious accreditations in higher education.
When a school submits research to ChatSDG, the AI chatbot acts as a peer reviewer and creates a personalized report that answers the question, “What is the social impact of your journal article?” Give each journal or article a score from zero to five, with five being the most aligned with the UN’s goals.
If the article hasn’t been published yet, the bot includes ways for researchers to improve it. For articles already published, ChatSDG suggests how the research could be used by people in the real world.
“It will revolutionize the [business school] curriculum,” Haub Dean Joseph DiAngelo told Bloomberg about ChatSDG. “It will revolutionize the way faculty members do research and it will revolutionize the way schools provide their metrics for the accreditation process.”
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ChatSDG could dramatically reduce the time business schools must spend obtaining and maintaining AACSB certification, which has so far been awarded to only a third of business schools in the United States and 6% globally. According to Bloomberg, obtaining certification can take six years and currently requires countless hours of evaluation and human relationships.
ChatSDG “meets AACSB accreditation requirements to demonstrate social impact,” the AACSB confirmed.
Using ChatSDG to evaluate articles could put business schools on the fast track to accreditation and reduce the time it would have taken human reviewers to do the same thing.
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The Haub school joined forces with Cabells Scholarly Analytics to create the AI chatbot, which has been piloted at 10 AACSB-accredited business schools over the past 18 months, according to Bloomberg.
AI has increasingly been seen as a business tool, with an October study from Harvard Business School finding that consultants who used AI for certain tasks completed their work more quickly and produced higher-quality results.
Most business schools in the United States are already incorporating AI into their curriculum, including the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Business and Northwestern University’s Kellogg School of Management.