SUNY Oswego will offer a "Chat GPT for Business" class during its summer session. It is one of the first emerging classes focused on AI business relations.
When Mohammad Tajvarpour first heard about ChatGPT, an artificial intelligence chatbot from the company OpenAI, he knew he had to move quickly. As an assistant professor of marketing at SUNY Oswego, Tajvarpour knew this product was something his students would encounter in their real-world experiences. He said the class is a matter of preparing students for today’s workforce.
“We need to keep ourselves updated and we need to update our students,” Tajvarpour said. “They are going to the job market, we ought to train them for the things that they really need, so they can perform the tasks the new industry needs them for.”
The class will explore the foundations of ChatGPT before diving into topics like ChatGPT language, data and ethics. Tajvarpour said while ChatGPT can make some processes ten times faster, understanding the ethics surrounding its use is vital to its integrity. He said ethical discussions should have started yesterday.
“Ethics are super important at this stage,” Tajvarpour said. “It’s not something that we can [say] ‘ok, we have time for it,’ We don’t have time. We should start today, even today is late.”
Tajvarpour continues to update class materials every day, keeping up with the rapidly changing AI world, he says ChatGPT does not begin to cover the capabilities of other emerging platforms.
“ChatGPT is just the tip of the iceberg,” Tajvarpour said. “There are so many other platforms, so many other models and systems that we have that are as capable as this system in other areas.”
Tajvarpour said the emergence of ChatGPT and other AI platforms is marking a new type of revolution in the workplace.
“We had the industrial revolution, now we have the intellectual revolution,” Tajvarpour said “With the industrial revolution, blue-collar people lost their jobs. With the intellectual revolution, it’s doctors, it’s lawyers, it’s pilots that are at risk.”
Tajvarpour said both he and his students are looking forward to the challenges AI will present in the classroom.
“I am very excited about the course,” Tajvarpour said. “Every day I receive emails from my class, they are so interested in it. I have so many students who want to take the course but unfortunately, we do not have enough seats in the course.”
The ChatGPT for business will have its pilot run during SUNY Oswego’s second summer course session this month.
