McIntire´s M.S. in the Management of Information Technology program has moved quickly to embed generative artificial intelligence into its core curriculum, prioritizing real-world business applications over engineering detail. Under the leadership of professor Stefano Grazioli the program added genAI content as early as 2022. That early pivot set the stage for a phased approach that pairs pedagogy with secure tooling, ensuring student work and sensitive data remain within McIntire´s environment.
Technical staff built a controlled platform in early 2024 to let the McIntire community experiment safely. Jack Robbins designed the system so data stays on campus and added retrieval-augmented generation to ground responses in curated materials and reduce hallucinations. In early 2025 professor Ryan Wright invited Robbins to expand the platform into course-specific tutors. Faculty volunteers including Bryan Lewis, Jingjing Li, and Kiera Allison helped scope and pilot tutors that act less like answer machines and more like coaching partners: they ask follow-up questions, explain reasoning, and guide students through nuanced tasks.
One concrete example launched in february 2025, when professor Jingjing Li introduced a predictive analytics assignment in mod 3 that used a Jupyter Notebook to model customer churn for a telecommunications dataset. The AI tutor supported students through a set of 20 targeted questions, enabling working professionals to practice coding and analytics on their schedules. Faculty reported stronger student confidence, more substantive class participation, and office hours that focused on open-ended discussion rather than step-by-step debugging. Li noted students felt better equipped to converse with data scientists and make managerial decisions based on technical work.
Other instructors applied tutors to writing and communication. Kiera Allison redesigned memo instruction to teach students how to use generative tools as coaches rather than shortcuts, and Bryan Lewis incorporated discussions of how generative artificial intelligence alters cybersecurity, as both a defense and a threat vector. Looking ahead, McIntire is iterating on tutor prompts, expanding data sources such as lecture recordings, and exploring lecture companion agents and faculty assistant tools to summarize feedback and draft course materials. The effort emphasizes pragmatic, secure adoption that aligns technology with measurable learning outcomes.
