Student Projects

Applying AI to real business problems

The strongest proof point in AI@GSM is not what students read. It is what they build.

AI is rapidly reshaping how businesses operate, and future leaders need more than awareness. They need hands-on experience applying it.

Across our UC Davis graduate business programs, students apply AI and analytics to business problems as classroom projects and often for real organizational stakes. These projects do more than sharpen technical skill. 

Students analyze data, develop models, test solutions and learn how human judgment interacts with machine intelligence. They learn how to frame ambiguous problems, work across teams and produce insight that matters to organizations.

• In our 10-week MBA capstone Integrated Management Project (IMP), you'll team up to develop solutions to business problems for client large multinational companies, small businesses or nonprofits. You'll put AI to work as an advanced execution engine that shifts your workload from manual data aggregation to high-value strategic decision-making as your fine-tune your recommendations to deliver to client leaders.

"We were looking for a tool to calculate the weighted measures within the variables that we were analyzing. The biggest ah-ha moment was when ChatGPT was able to create a rough template for a tool that we eventually had to refine for equally distributing the calculation on a sliding scale for multiple calculations from one single input. This would have taken us days if not weeks to build in Excel."

— MBA student Amanda Meyer, Integrated Management Project team lead

• Our unique year-long Master of Science in Business Analytics (MSBA) Practicum gives students real-world applied professional experience working in data, analytics and AI in the world’s most fertile ground for data and AI innovation. You'll be embedded within a San Francisco Bay Area or U.S. based company, working alongside their data and analytics teams. 
  
  From prompt engineering and agentic workflows to AI-assisted coding and practical AI governance, you'll apply these skills to to solve challenging business problems.
  
  Nearly 80% of MSBA students surveyed said the practicum helped them learn AI skills.

"Our team’s practicum project with RoloScan, an AI-powered business-card scanning and contact-management app, became a hands-on lesson in connecting analytics to product strategy."

— Vedant Patel MSBA 26

• In our Master of Professional Accountancy program, students benefit from interactive case studies, including guest speakers from Big Four firms like KPMG. For example, small teams were asked to analyze a fact pattern involving potential international taxation issues. Each group was free to use any AI tool of their choosing to determine whether international tax rules might apply and how.

"The KPMG guest speakers emphasized critical professional responsibility: AI output must always be validated. The session reinforced that the future of accounting is not about replacing professionals with technology, but about equipping professionals to use technology wisely and responsibly."

— Visiting Professor Steven Gill

Preparing AI-ready Leaders

AI-ready leaders think strategically, creatively and critically.

For example, Assistant Professor Helen Shuxuan Zeng's course, AI Transformation: Building AI-Powered Business, is one of several AI-integrated UC Davis MBA electives. It immerses students in how AI is transforming industries and prepares them to engage critically and creatively with these technologies. 

Students work in teams on a capstone project to design, analyze and present an end-to-end AI-driven solution to a real business problem. A wide range of student projects creatively leverage AI-powered tools, ranging from:

• Improving user retention on digital platforms 
• Storytelling apps for children 
• Generative AI platforms that summarize policy with high fidelity to original sources 
• AI-driven review sentiment analysis for business decision-making
• Peer-to-peer electricity exchange among independently operated community solar farms
• AI-powered career networking platforms

"The course ultimately aims to ready leaders who can integrate strategic insight with technical understanding and ethical judgment, preparing them to navigate—and shape—the future of AI in business and society."

— Assistant Professor Helen Shuxuan Zeng