Managing AI in Business
An applied management course where students learn to lead by directing, evaluating, and overriding AI agents through real business operations — building and launching a company end-to-end across a single semester.
What students will be able to do
By the end of this course, students will be able to:
- Analyze the competitive landscape of a chosen industry by directing AI agents to gather, synthesize, and evaluate market intelligence — distinguishing AI-generated insight from AI-generated noise.
- Create a primary market research study that evaluates the likelihood of success for a proposed company or product launch, using AI-supported data collection and analytical frameworks.
- Construct a complete business plan and go-to-market strategy executed through a managed AI workforce, including organizational design, financial projections, and a defined customer acquisition path.
- Evaluate the performance of an AI-managed business operation against measurable benchmarks, and justify decisions where human judgment was required to override or redirect AI output.
Required framework
This course follows the standard Workforce Education Course Manual (WECM) framework for Special Topics courses, with course-specific content layered beneath.
Topics address recently identified current events, skills, knowledge, and/or attitudes and behaviors pertinent to the technology or occupation and relevant to the professional development of the student. This course was designed to be repeated multiple times to improve student proficiency.
Course-specific description. This Special Topics offering focuses on the practical management of AI tools and agents in modern business operations. Students choose a company and industry sector, build and direct an AI workforce, conduct competitive analysis and primary market research, execute a go-to-market strategy, and evaluate the resulting business performance against defined benchmarks. The course operationalizes management theory from BUSI 1301 by giving students a real workforce to lead — one made of AI agents — and a real company to grow.
This course can be substituted for BMGT 2388 Internship in the Entrepreneurship AAS degree plan.
Where do you want to go?
The common paths into the course. Everything is also linked in the top navigation.
Objectives
The four measurable course objectives, mapped to Bloom's Taxonomy and the Program Level Outcomes for the Entrepreneurship AAS.
Curriculum
The week-by-week arc — from company selection and entity formation through market research, AI workforce build, launch, and final evaluation.
About
Course rationale, target student, prerequisites, alignment with the Entrepreneurship AAS degree plan, and instructor background.
Contact
Russell Holloway — instructor of record. Department contacts for Management/Entrepreneurship at ACC.
Why this course exists
Every business student graduating today will manage AI workers within five years of entering the workforce. Most will manage them sooner. The skill of managing an AI agent — knowing what to delegate, how to verify output, when to override, and how to build a workflow that combines human judgment with machine speed — is the management skill of the next decade.
This course teaches that skill by giving students a real test case: a company they choose, an industry they research, an AI workforce they build, and a launch they execute. Every chapter from the introductory management course gets operationalized. Students don't just read about strategy, organizational behavior, and financial planning — they apply those concepts to a working business with measurable outcomes.
The course is part of ACC's new Entrepreneurship AAS degree program, with a soft launch in Fall 2026 as an elective. It is designed to be repeated as the AI tooling landscape evolves.