Jack Ryan (MBA/MSF ’26)
What is it actually like to study AI as an MBA student? At the Carroll School of Management, the focus is on business realities: how AI fundamentally reshapes business leadership, organizational culture, and long-term strategy.
Jack Ryan (MBA/MSF ’26), shares insights into his experiences this past year, describing how coursework at BC blends business fundamentals with AI technologies.
How did you see AI integrated into your BC MBA coursework?
Some professors heavily encouraged AI use in their classes and encouraged us to leverage AI for our projects. Courses such as Prof. Pieter VanderWerf’s Machine Learning elective introduced me to more standard Machine Learning uses.
Most courses offer open-ended projects where you can choose your focus. I used those assignments as an opportunity to plug in my interest in AI in various ways.
For example, in Prof. Kanishka Misra’s Pricing Strategy elective, I completed a 50-page research project on AI agents and the future of consumer purchasing on platforms like Amazon and Walmart.
I also synthesized various AI projects into a unified capstone for Prof. Randal Kenworthy’s AI in Business elective.
When interviewing or networking with corporate recruiters, how did you pitch the AI literacy you gained at Boston College?
Many employers are still figuring out what “AI literacy” means, but it’s increasingly listed under job requirements and comes up frequently in interviews. Companies are actively looking for candidates who understand both the core business domain and how to leverage AI tools.
I pitch my literacy by pointing to tangible proof. I shared my Substack detailing the work I did at BC, alongside my custom portfolio website, to demonstrate practical application rather than just theoretical knowledge.
Every business school is rushing to add AI to their course catalogs right now. Based on your experience, what do you think Boston College is doing differently to ensure these courses aren’t just trendy electives, but rigorous business tools?
A lot of schools tend to focus on putting “AI” in the course title, rather than focusing on the content itself. In Pricing Strategy with Prof. Misra, “AI” isn’t in the title, but our semester-long project focused on AI and algorithmic pricing—which is Prof. Misra’s actual research domain. Having a professor actively publishing in that space was an incredible resource.
What BC gets right is its core Data Analtyics sequence. Plus, if you take the analytics electives, you truly understand the foundational concepts, code, and underlying tools behind AI. That baseline makes adopting new AI tools far more intuitive and effective.
Technology moves faster than university curriculum cycles. How have you seen Carroll School professors adapt their syllabi in real-time to keep up with new and shifting business realities?
Professors adapt in different ways. I took Prof. Karim Basta’s Global Financial Markets elective when the “Is AI a bubble?” narrative was gaining traction and he actively assigned relevant readings and led real-time class discussions about it.
Other times, adaptation happens through student engagement. When I shared my Claude Code skill with Prof. Miao Liu, he was incredibly receptive, thanked me, and mentioned it inspired him to adjust how he teaches the class next year.
I also don’t think low-tech approaches are out of date. In Coding for Business, we could use AI for learning, but exams were on paper. In Corporate Valuation with Prof. Edith Hotchkiss, we calculated Discounted Cash Flow models by hand. If I hadn’t mastered those concepts on paper first, any ambiguity in my head would have made building accurate AI automations impossible.
High-order critical thinking and domain mastery matter. You don’t want to delegate the thinking to AI. Rather, you want to do the thinking and delegate the tasks.
How do you foresee the lessons you learned in the BC MBA impacting your immediate career goals and the value you’ll bring to organizations after graduation?
The biggest asset BC gave me was a rock-solid foundation. Going through the pre-program Managerial Statistics module, the analytics core, and STEM-focused electives provided me with strong business acumen, financial intuition, and analytical rigor. That conceptual baseline gave me the confidence to enroll in a post-graduate certificate program in Agentic AI Applications, and it allows me to bring immediate value in my current role at SAP.
At SAP, where there is a massive push for AI adoption, senior colleagues have even reached out to me for tutoring on how to apply AI. My MBA/MSF dual-degree background from BC ensures that AI acts as a supercharger for my productivity, but I am driving the tool, not the other way around.
Throughout my internships, I’ve combined regression models from Prof. Jiri Chod’s class with framework concepts from Prof. Pilar Opazo’s Managing People & Organizations class. Now in my full-time work, I constantly draw on my BC coursework for forecasting, process improvement, and stakeholder alignment.
Ultimately, BC taught me that AI is most powerful when paired with solid human judgment, domain expertise, and continuous learning. As professors like Dr. Arup Ganguly emphasize, AI can run calculations, but humans provide the critical financial reasoning and context engineering.