Teaching Business Students Chatbots: First Forays and Lessons Learned

In the past few years, artificial intelligence (AI) has been making a visible impact in industry and organizations, resulting in an increasing demand for AI skills in the workplace. How can we teach business students AI technologies so that they are prepared for the future workforce? This paper presents our first forays of teaching chatbots - one type of AI technologies - to business students using the scenario of customer service. Overall, students demonstrated their confidence in creating chatbots, gained a better understanding of the logic of conversational bots and their impact on business process automation in the organizations. We concluded with our lessons learned from the teaching case, including the importance of choosing the appropriate chatbot platform, relevant scenarios, and connecting the learning process with students' future professional path.