The Haub School of Business at Saint Joseph’s University in Philadelphia is running an AI pilot program called ChatSDG, and last week professors, deans and administrators from other business schools flocked to the world’s largest business education conference to test it. Bloomberg reported.
ChatSDG assesses how well academic articles and journals align with the United Nations Sustainable Development Goals, which include everything from eradicating poverty to ensuring sustainable consumption. This alignment is required for business schools to receive accreditation from AACSB, an international organization founded in 1916. According to Indeed, 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 like a peer reviewer and creates a custom report that answers the question, “What is the societal impact of your journal article?” It gives each journal or article a score of zero to five, with five most consistent with UN goals.
If the article has not yet been published, the bot provides opportunities for researchers to improve it. For previously published articles, ChatSDG suggests how the research could be used by people in the real world.
“It will revolutionize that [business school] “It will revolutionize the way faculty members conduct research, and it will revolutionize the way schools provide their metrics for the accreditation process.”
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ChatSDG could reduce the time business schools spend obtaining and maintaining their AACSB certification, which has only been awarded to a third of business schools in the U.S. and 6% worldwide. According to Bloomberg, obtaining certification can take six years and currently requires countless hours of human assessment and reporting.
ChatSDG “meets AACSB’s accreditation requirement to provide evidence of societal 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 complete the same task.
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The Haub School partnered with Cabells Scholarly Analytics to develop the AI chatbot, which has been tested at 10 AACSB-accredited business schools over the past 18 months, according to Bloomberg.
AI is increasingly seen as a business tool. An October Harvard Business School study found that consultants who used AI for certain tasks completed their work faster and produced higher quality results.
Most business schools in the US are already integrating AI into their curriculum, including the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania and the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University.