Students worked with faculty on classroom workshops, course resources and plans for deeper AI integration.
AI Student Fellows in the Martha and Spencer Love School of Business spent the spring 2026 semester working with faculty on projects ranging from first-year AI workshops to resources for more advanced AI use in business courses.
The program paired undergraduate students with faculty members to support AI-related projects across the school. Student fellows helped develop and deliver workshops, interview faculty and build materials for future courses and boot camps.
Sakura Kawakami ’26 worked with Scott Oakes, assistant teaching professor of management, and fellow students Julia Amodeo ‘26 and Katie Geraghty ’26 on workshops for Gateway classes.
The team visited eight classes and reached approximately 240 students through 20-minute sessions with hands-on exercises. The workshops introduced students to Gemini Pro, available through Elon, and focused on practical skills such as improving prompts through iteration and added context.
“The primary goal was to establish a baseline of AI fluency among Gateway students, who are primarily first-year business students,” Oakes said. “We also wanted to test whether a short, bootcamp-style training session could effectively introduce students to practical AI skills within a classroom setting.”
Faculty established the project’s overall objectives before the students joined. Kawakami, Amodeo and Geraghty then helped develop classroom activities, learning objectives, presentation materials, pre- and post-session surveys, and the rollout plan. The students also led the workshops and helped analyze the resulting data.
“My role as an AI Fellow was to act as a bridge between students and faculty, advising students on how to use AI to enhance their learning, not replace it,” said Kawakami, a Business Analytics and Project Management major from Rotorua, New Zealand. “The goal was to make sure students felt confident using these tools in ways that supported them.”
One focus was helping students understand that effective use of AI often requires refining a prompt rather than accepting the first response.
“One of our biggest teaching points was the importance of iteration when prompting AI,” Kawakami said. “By refining and tailoring your prompts to your own needs, you get far more accurate and useful responses.”
Oakes said the student fellows strengthened the project by bringing their own experiences with AI into the classroom.
“Peer-to-peer learning is incredibly powerful,” he said. “First-year students often feel more comfortable asking questions and exploring new technologies when they see successful upper-level students demonstrating how they actually use those tools.”
Another team worked with Kem Zhang, associate professor of business analytics, on projects designed to support more advanced AI use in business courses.
Thomas Case ’26, a supply chain management and business analytics major from Atlanta, G.A. and Oliver Lorraine ’27, a project management and business analytics major from Red Bank, N.J. gathered input from faculty and developed materials for future workshops. One project focused on Associate Professor David Jiang’s, Bring the Venture to Life entrepreneurship course, where students develop and launch venture ideas.
Based on the needs identified for the course, the team created materials for an “AI-powered entrepreneurship” workshop covering topics such as prompting for code, e-commerce, payment integration and deployment.
Case led the workshop design and drafted presentation materials. Lorraine documented the development process and built reusable coding templates for future workshops and boot camps.
“The transition from AI users to AI builders or AI architects is an important distinction because knowing how to use a tool generally is much different than knowing how to use a tool to innovate,” said Case.
Lorraine also created Google Colab notebooks with coding templates for future use.
Zhang said the goal is to help students move beyond basic familiarity with AI tools.
“For business students, knowing how to use an AI tool is expected,” Zhang said. “The real advantage comes when they understand how these tools can be used in problem solving and to create concrete, AI-based solutions.”
Several projects from the spring semester are expected to continue during the 2026-27 academic year, including the entrepreneurship workshop, an AI Boot Camp for incoming students and additional work on AI integration.
The spring 2026 AI Student Fellows were Brandon Boudreau ‘27, Thomas Case ‘26, Oliver Lorraine ‘27, Dylan Stone ‘28, Julia Amodeo ‘26, Sakura Kawakami ‘26, Lindsay Balick ‘27, Katie Geraghty ‘26, Katrina Papierman ’26 and Tristan D’Adamo ‘28.