2026 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition

This work-in-progress describes a project assigned in a senior-level Business Information Systems course that requires students to engage with generative AI to develop a fictional business plan. The objective of the project is to encourage students to explore a variety of prompting techniques as well as a model’s response to ethical questions and hallucination tests. Although the students may have used AI for other classes by this point in their curriculum, the prior exposure is generally in a technical context where the correctness of a response is objective. Additionally, any AI use is typically unstructured and informal. By introducing a formal assignment with a subjective context, students are forced to consider how responses might be interpreted and applied. Students are consistently surprised by the loose ethical stances taken by many mainstream LLMs and the willingness of chatbots to suggest overly ambitious business strategies. Meanwhile, logo generation encourages discussion of intellectual property considerations and digital authenticity. When students compare the experience of plan development between different generative AIs, they begin to understand trade-offs present in this technology. Finally, students employ forward thinking to consider how generative AI will continue to transform business and technology into the future. Further refinement of the assignment is intended to emphasize critical consideration of the role of generative AI in business applications like business plan development, with a focus on the ethical implications of automating these business decisions.