Curriculum
From company selection to a measurable launch outcome — every week ties back to one of the four course objectives. Click any week to expand for the full session detail.
The 16-week arc at a glance
Each student picks a GICS sector and a business entity (C-Corp, LLC, or Sole Proprietorship) in the first three weeks. From there they build, launch, and stress-test a real company managed by an AI workforce — culminating in a 24-hour war game and the Davos Economic Summit.
Week 01 Orientation & AI Workshop — tooling, agents, prompts, and your first hire
Objective 1 · Analyze
Textbook chapters: Why businesses exist, addressing demand, market analysis. Deeper dive: business plan creation, organizational behavior intro, project scoping.
Monday Orientation. Overview of the course, expectations, and the classroom economy. Wednesday AI Workshop: Every student sets up Google Gemini through ACC Workspace. They learn the difference between a chat session and a configured agent — agents have a name, a job description, a memory, and tool permissions.
Prompt fundamentals. Anatomy of an effective prompt — role, context, task, constraints, output format. Why specificity beats cleverness. The difference between asking AI to do something and asking AI to decide something.
Your first hire. Students stand up a single general-purpose AI agent and put it to work on a small task — research an industry of interest, draft a one-paragraph company concept. By end of week they've picked a preliminary company concept and a GICS sector.
Week 02 Macro-Econ & Pitch Round — competitive landscape, pitch to financiers
Objective 1 · Analyze
Monday: Macro-econ and competitive landscape. Analyzing the chosen GICS sector and identifying a market gap. Wednesday: Business plan as a pitch-to-financiers. This is the forward-looking half of finance (capital markets, treasury, valuation models). Students pitch a Claude investor (a logic gate with parameters) for growth capital. They learn what investors look for, what dilution means, and what strings come with outside money.
Week 03 The Team — agentic workforce design, specialization, HR
Objective 1 · Analyze
Textbook chapters: Organizational behavior (deep dive), human resources. Deeper dive: hiring, specialization, onboarding, training, equipping.
Operational. Students hit the wall — one AI doing everything loses context, drifts, contradicts itself. They learn about context windows, token limits, and memory restrictions. This IS the HR lesson. They break the team into specialists, write training prompts (onboarding docs), and decide what tools each agent needs. Tool allocation = resource budgeting. Token limits = headcount budget.
Key insight. Context-window problems ARE human-resource problems. Students discover why companies specialize instead of having one person do everything.
Week 04 The Rules — legal, compliance, ToS day, entity finalization
Objective 1 · Analyze
Textbook chapters: Legal environment of business, compliance, regulatory frameworks. Deeper dive: contracts, incorporation documents, document storage protocols, industry standards and best practices.
Entity type finalized. C-Corp students formalize board structure and draft executive compensation packages — including golden-parachute clauses. LLC students file operating agreements. Sole props document personal liability exposure.
Operational. Students conduct a real Terms-of-Service assessment of every AI tool their company uses — what data can be shared, what IP belongs to the vendor, retention policies, what stays internal. They establish document storage and naming protocols that get referenced all semester. They're building the governance layer.
Callback. When someone gets sloppy later, you point back to their own Week 4 protocols.
Week 05 The Hustle — marketing, Pitch Week, the prisoner's-dilemma poll
Objective 2 · Create & Evaluate
Textbook chapters: Marketing fundamentals, promotional strategy.
Game theory and the split. The referral-revenue negotiation is a prisoner's dilemma. Hold at 100% and each student keeps more per referral; the first one who offers a split to their network gets more referrals and a bigger total pie. The incentive to defect is real because the money is real. Game theory taught through their own wallets.
Hands-on market research. Students design and run a small live marketing experiment for their company — a referral or promotional campaign of their own choosing — and watch real audience behavior in response. They learn to distinguish what their AI agents predicted vs. what the market actually did, and they bring that delta back to class as data.
Geographic diversification (seeds the war game). The geographic spread of each student's customer or audience network becomes a strategic asset or liability during the Week 8 stress test. Concentrated networks are exposed to regional shocks; diversified networks are resilient. The decision is being made right now — they just don't know it yet.
Week 06 The Machine — operations, supply chain, QC promotion
Objective 2 · Create & Evaluate
Textbook chapters: Operations, production, supply chain. Deeper dive: scaling output, quality control, process optimization, supply chain of information.
Operational. Output is scaling. Quality starts slipping. Students can't personally QC everything anymore. Time to promote an agent to a QC specialist role. This is the moment they learn why QC exists as a separate function — because the people doing the work can't also be the people checking the work.
Supply chain. Information flow through the AI team is a supply chain. Raw inputs (data, prompts) → processing (agent work) → output (deliverables) → QC → delivery. Bottlenecks, single points of failure, redundancy.
Week 07 The Director's Chair — managing managers, delegation, context drift
Objective 3 · Construct
Textbook chapters: Management levels, delegation, organizational structure. Deeper dive: managing managers, silos, context drift, centralization vs. decentralization.
Operational. Students hand off primary oversight to a management-level AI agent. They're now sitting at director level. They've outsourced day-to-day supervision but this comes with new challenges: siloed workforce, context drift between teams, decisions being made two layers down that they don't find out about until something breaks.
Key insight. This is the jump from manager to director. They're not doing the work, not even directly managing the workers — they're managing a manager. Every MBA program teaches this as theory. These students feel it.
Week 08 The War Game (Midterm) — 90-minute in-class stress test, cascading inbox
Objective 3 · Construct
Format. A 90-minute in-class simulation that stress-tests every decision made so far. Whatever business they picked in Week 1, built across the term, gets pressure-tested with real-world chaos.
The inbox. Students receive cascading notifications throughout the simulation — macroeconomic news (inflation prints, rate decisions), industry-specific events (rezoning laws, regulatory changes), demand shocks, supply-chain disruptions, worker strikes / system outages, and competitor moves.
C-Corp danger. If the company tanks hard enough, the board (a Claude logic gate) can vote to replace the CEO. Student is out with whatever golden parachute they negotiated in Week 4. If they didn't negotiate one, they walk with nothing.
Geographic exposure pays off. The geographic concentration of each student's customer base from Week 5 is now a live variable. Concentrated markets are exposed to regional shocks. Diversified markets are resilient. The decision they made in Week 5 is the decision being graded right now.
Week 09 Reorg & Strategy Reset — post-simulation performance reviews
Objective 3 · Construct
Post-simulation performance reviews of every AI agent on the team. Students decide who gets promoted, reorganized, or replaced based on how they performed during the War Game. Strategy is reset based on the data. Companies that drifted off-thesis course-correct here; companies that built clean operating systems consolidate the lead.
Week 10 Audit & GAAP — accounting, clean financials, regulatory filings
Objective 3 · Construct
Textbook chapters: Accounting fundamentals. Deeper dive: producing clean ledgers, P&L, balance sheet.
Operational. This is the backward-looking half of the finance module. Regulatory filings, audit prep, investor relations. Students produce GAAP-compliant statements that will hold up in the Davos sector reports at Week 16. Governance structure tested — boards review filings, LLCs review distributions, sole props confront personal-liability exposure.
Week 11 International & Cross-Border — FX, trade dynamics, the EU/US split made real
Objective 3 · Construct
Foreign exchange, cross-border capital flows, trade dynamics. If two sections are running, this is where the U.S. and EU zones interact — exports, imports, tariffs, currency hedging. Same curriculum, different regulatory environment. International business taught by living it.
Week 12 Governance, ESG & Exit Strategy — fiduciary lens, M&A, SEC disclosure
Objective 4 · Evaluate & Justify
The fiduciary lens. ESG reporting, stakeholder accountability, the difference between governance theater and governance that holds up under stress.
The chapter most intro courses skip entirely. Sell, merge, IPO, or shut down. Each entity type has different exit mechanics — C-corp acquisition vs. LLC IPO vs. sole-prop wind-down. Students confront the question: what happens to the business now?
Week 13 Investor Relations & Sales — delivering a business presentation
Objective 4 · Evaluate & Justify
Translating operational reality into a compelling narrative for external stakeholders. Students practice the art of the pitch, fielding hostile Q&A, and justifying their business decisions to investors. This serves as the direct staging ground for the final presentations.
Week 14 The Override Journal — evaluating AI, human judgment
Objective 4 · Evaluate & Justify
Every week of the semester, students logged decisions where they overrode or redirected AI output. That artifact is now the spine of their final evaluation. What was AI good at? Where did it fall short? What required human judgment, and why? Honest assessment of what worked, what didn't, and why the human in the loop is still required.
Week 15 Summit Prep & Close-out — final staging, review
Objective 4 · Evaluate & Justify
Review and close-out of the semester. Students finalize their presentations, compile their sector data, and prepare to defend their decisions at the Economic Summit. The accountability web tightens: the industry leader's presentation quality depends on every other company in their sector delivering clean data.
Week 16 Davos: The Economic Summit — industry leaders present, capstone
Objective 4 · Evaluate & Justify
Format. The capstone presentation. One industry leader per GICS sector presents the state of their industry to the room.
The map. By now every student has plotted the geographic footprint of their company's market reach. Each industry leader pulls up a sector-wide map showing the combined footprint of every company in their GICS sector. The audience can literally see which industries are geographically exposed and which are resilient. The map tells the story before anyone opens their mouth.
Grading. Industry leaders are graded by the instructor, by self-assessment, and by every participant in their sector. Everyone else is graded by the instructor and their industry leader. This tracks with real-world accountability.
What runs every week
Weekly business news loop. Each class opens with a current Wall Street Journal article and a discussion of how the news ripples through each student's industry and company. By Week 4 they're scanning headlines on their own.
Weekly AI tooling check-in. A standing review of new AI capabilities, tools, and limitations released that week — keeping the course content honest as the landscape evolves.
Weekly override journal. Students log every decision where they overrode or redirected AI output, building the artifact that will be evaluated in Objective 4.
The two-section twist (when enrollment supports it). If the course runs two sections, one becomes the U.S. economic zone and one becomes the EU economic zone — same curriculum, different regulatory environment (GDPR vs. U.S. privacy law, different trade dynamics, different crisis exposure). Same lectures, international-business curriculum without adding a single class meeting.