Tuck’s new AI requirement for the MBA First-Year Project gives students hands-on experience researching, building, and testing AI-driven solutions for real-world clients and timely challenges.
As artificial intelligence becomes more firmly embedded in the workplace, Tuck is innovating to prepare students for managing the strategic, ethical, and business opportunities that AI is presenting.
While AI is already integrated across the entire MBA curriculum, including in specific AI-focused courses such as AI for Managers and AI for the C-Suite, Tuck has recently introduced a new mandatory AI requirement into the First-Year Project (FYP), a core part of the Tuck curriculum and one of the most distinctive parts of the Tuck MBA experience. “Many of our FYP clients are early-stage companies that are just beginning to explore how they can best use AI, which creates numerous opportunities for our students to make a meaningful impact,” said Becky Rice, executive director of the FYP course. “That said, even our more established clients have been experimenting with AI and looking for guidance and new ideas for how best to use it.”
The FYP is a nine-week required MBA course that gives students a chance to step outside the classroom and tackle high-stakes problems for startups, nonprofits, small and medium size enterprises, and Fortune 500 companies. Students can even do an entrepreneurial FYP venture if they so choose. Every week, students meet with their client and conduct research while applying rigorous analytics and synthesizing data to develop recommendations on how to solve their client’s business challenge. A faculty advisor is assigned to each team and meets with their students to work alongside them, answer questions, and evaluate their progress.
Even our more established clients have been experimenting with AI and looking for guidance and new ideas for how best to use it.
— Becky Rice, Executive Director, First-Year Project
This year, Tuck students are participating in 51 FYPs with companies as wide-ranging as VESTAL, Pacific Kelp, NEMO, and Spark Spine. Though the focus of every project may not have been AI, all the teams did a great job leveraging AI to support and enhance the outcome of the project.
Rice said that the FYP AI requirement is comprised of three phases:
One FYP, for example, built an app that performs global market analysis for a new product, while another used AI to develop a nodal heat map of the connections between customers, partnerships, strategic alliances, and investment relationships in the clinical trial space.
“Each instance is really customized and will cater to the project, the client and the team,” Rice said. “The goal is to elevate AI learning and aptitude for all of our first-year students, no matter what level they’re starting from.”
Prior to heading into their FYP, students received AI training from Microsoft using the Microsoft 365 AI platform, as well as support from the Tuck IT team, second-year students, and Feldberg librarians. This will help them navigate the “build” part of the requirement, which asks students to take their AI education to the next level, as well as give them ample preparation as they head into their internship.
“We want students to create something meaningful for their clients or advance their early-stage business concept via an eFYP using AI and to go beyond prompting AI for answers,” said Joe Hall, senior associate dean for the MBA Program. “This will help our students offer real value to our FYP clients and demonstrate to them what’s feasible and possible using AI.”
For example, students on Kirsten Detrick’s five FYP teams strategically interacted with AI by directing and questioning the technology and refining its output. By the end of their FYPs, all five of her teams reported feeling more confident and facile in using AI than they did at the start. “Students who had never touched a project management tool were building professional Gantt charts and work plans for real clients within days,” said Detrick, an adjunct professor of business administration. One team even built a multi-agent analytical system to assess whether an existing surgical technology could be applied to three new clinical segments. She added, “Teams with no self-described AI experts were constructing detailed consumer personas, stress testing loyalty strategies against simulated customer segments, and then validating those AI generated insights through actual customer interactions.”
Teams with no self-described AI experts were constructing detailed consumer personas, stress testing loyalty strategies against simulated customer segments, and then validating those AI generated insights through actual customer interactions.
— Kirsten Detrick T’92, Adjunct Professor of Business Administration
In another example, Guyanna Bedington T’27 led an entrepreneurial FYP called Vera, exploring how AI could be used in the medical setting to help clinicians determine when AI is reliable and when caution is required. She and the team used Claude to analyze qualitative interview transcripts to explore attitudes toward LLMs in clinical and educational settings, as well as explore how AI hallucinates with the hope of uncovering where the highest risks emerge in clinical settings.
“Entrepreneurship requires you to think big and bold, but it also requires space and grace to realize that staying in discovery doesn’t mean you’ve failed,” she said. “I came into the FYP hoping we would have a prototype by the end, but this is a complex problem with a real market gap. For me, success has become asking whether we put ourselves in the entrepreneurial trenches, learned from the process, and used the resources at Tuck and across Dartmouth to dig into a really big problem.”
Given that many students come to Tuck looking to be challenged, working with AI creates an opportunity for that growth by giving them the chance to build skills they haven’t had the chance to develop before.
“Our goal is to give every first-year student the confidence and capability to use AI in thoughtful, impactful ways,” said Rice. “While the FYP allows students to take what they’ve learned in the classroom and apply it to real-world challenges, adding AI as a requirement will make sure that our students have the required skills to be successful in tomorrow’s workplace.”