Teaching Business Students Chatbots:

First Forays and Lessons Learned

Yu Chen, Timothy R. Hill
School of Information Systems and Technology
Lucas College and Graduate School of Business
San Jose State University
Introduction
• Artificial Intelligence making a visible impact
in industry and organizations
• 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?
• We present our first forays of teaching
chatbots – one type of AI technologies
Image source: Jennifer COVID chatbot https://juji.io/

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Related Work
• AI in the future workplace
• In MIS, some work has started to investigate AI in business analytics in IS
curriculum
• Researchers started to investigate the demand for AI in future workplaces and
critical need for integrating AI education into MIS curricula (Siau et al. 2018)
• Business applications of AI in domains such as marketing, finance, and human
resources, enterprise process management, auditing and supply chain
(Nascimento et al. 2018)
• Chatbot in the workplace
• Internal/external support, human resources, purchase and sales, employee
self-service, and education/training (von Wolff et al. 2019)
• Facilitate collaboration, enhance work performance, healthy lifestyle
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Project Design
• Requirements
• Ease of use – choosing the
appropriate platform: https://juji.io/
• Usefulness – choosing relevant
scenario(s): customer service
• Project
• Phase 1: Chatbot asking questions
and its application in customer
experience survey
• Phase 2: Chatbot answering questions
and its application in customer
support
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 Phase 1
• Goals:
• Teach how to develop
chatbots that can ask users
questions and marketing
research surveys with
chatbot and Qualtrics
• Procedure:
• Tutorial (10 min)
• Exercise (20 min): create
customer experience
surveys using chatbot and https://www.qualtrics.com/ https://juji.io/
Qualtrics respectively
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Phase 1: Findings
• Student perceived pros and cons for Qualtrics surveys and Juji
chatbots

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 Phase 2
• Goals:
• Develop chatbot that can
answer questions
• Enhance problem-solving and
creative thinking
• Procedure
• Case description (10 min):
city government help desk
• Tutorial (15 min): live demo
• Exercise (40 min): created
chatbot for the city
government FAQs
• Peer evaluation (10 min) 7
Phase 2: Findings
• Among the 86 students who completed the session, 84 students
managed to provide a URL link for their chatbot
• Most students indicated they have learned how to create chatbots
• Some students were able to understand the logic and steps of
creating a Q&A chatbot, the coding component for Q&A, and present
a basic Q&A chatbot.
• Students indicated their enhanced understanding of the application
and impact of business process automation through this scenario

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Discussions
• Choose the appropriate
technology that matches
students’ technical
background
• Choose scenarios that
are relevant to students’
future workforce
• Connect the project with
the need in the future
workplace

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 Questions?
Yu Chen
San Jose State University
yu.chen@sjsu.edu

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