Online Self-paced

32-40 hours plus independent study time

All four AI essentials courses in one package (Business Gen AI, Communication, Predictive AI, and the Future)

Course Facilitators:

Kiera Allison, Zack Kass, Adam Kerpelman, and Jingjing Li

Kiera Allison 

Professor Allison teaches communication strategy and public speaking to undergraduate and graduate business students. She also coaches professionals across career stages on performance preparation, anxiety management, and vocal delivery.

Her research centers on performance cognition, communication technology, and educational reform. She is currently leading several inter-university studies on the impacts of AI on teaching and learning, and as a member of the Faculty AI Guides program, serves as a liaison between McIntire and the University for educational AI initiatives. Her online course, Writing with Generative AI, developed for the Commerce Essentials series, helps students navigate their future as writers and professionals in the current technological landscape.

Zack Kass 

Zack Kass is an AI Futurist, keynote speaker, consultant, adjunct professor and the former Head of Go To Market for OpenAI. He has spent over 14 years in AI, leading large teams at some of the industry’s most important companies. His mission is to ensure individuals, businesses, and governments are active participants in the AI-powered future by demystifying AI, making it accessible and understandable for everyone, and helping leaders navigate the rapidly evolving environment.

While Head of Go To Market at OpenAI, Zack worked at the helm of the team channeling OpenAI’s innovative research into tangible business solutions. Zack built the teams responsible for OpenAI’s sales, partnerships, and customer success and served as a personal adviser to countless executives deploying the technology across their business.

Today, he is considered one of the foremost thinkers in applied AI. His thought leadership and techno-optimist views have been featured in countless publications, such as Fortune, Newsweek, Entrepreneur, AdAge, and Business Insider. Zack still advises Fortune 1,000 board rooms, including Coca-Cola, Morgan Stanley, and Amgen.

Beyond the corporate world, Zack is a staunch techno-optimist, an advocate for AI’s potential to revolutionize the human condition and reduce suffering. He works tirelessly to promote the promise of AI, serving as a counter-narrative to the prevailing media cynicism.

Zack received his B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley, and resides in Santa Barbara, CA.

Adam Kerpelman

Adam Kerpelman has been an entrepreneur, a technologist, and a marketing leader for almost 20 years. He has founded, run, or led marketing for companies in digital marketing, content creation, telehealth, legal-tech, and big data. He was an early explorer of the capacity for data-driven marketing strategy enabled by modern digital platforms and coined the phrase “marketing engineer” for the operatives focused on the practice. Kerpelman created the world’s first “transmedia” web series, was an early player in streaming video, has racked up tens of millions of views for clients and companies, and won a few hackathons and pitch competitions. In his research, he focuses on marketing, mass media, decentralized governance and collaboration, artificial intelligence, and intellectual property.

Jingjing Li

Jingjing Li is the Andersen Alumni Associate Professor of IT and Innovation at the McIntire School of Commerce at the University of Virginia. She is the Academic Director of the M.S. in Business Analytics Program, which is jointly offered by the McIntire School and the Darden School of Business. She also serves as Associate Director of McIntire’s Center for Business Analytics. Her research focuses on the design, development, and management of artificial intelligence and data analytics systems, with applications in healthcare, marketing, platforms, and public policy. Her work appears in prestigious journals, including MIS Quarterly; Information Systems Research; Journal of Marketing; Strategic Management Journal; Journal of Management Information Systems; Review of Economics and Statistics; ACM Transactions on Information Systems; and Harvard Business Review. She has received several accolades for her research, such as the INFORMS Design Science Award and Best Paper Awards from CIST, WITS, and the INFORMS Data Science Workshop. Her research was also a finalist for the Shelby D. Hunt/Harold H. Maynard Award at the Journal of Marketing in 2020. Her research has been funded by the National Science Foundation, Amazon, Google, Microsoft, the 4-VA initiative, the Jefferson Trust, and UVA’s TYDE program and Data Analytics Center.

Professor Li is an Associate Editor for MIS Quarterly and serves on the Journal of the Association for Information Systems Editorial Review Board. She received MISQ’s Outstanding Associate Editor Award in 2024. Her professional service includes the WITS Board Member, Industry Liaison for the INFORMS College on AI, and Secretary/Treasurer for AIS SIGTech. She has co-chaired several flagship events in the Information Systems field, including WITS 2024 (where she received the Outstanding Service Award), the INFORMS Data Science Workshop 2023, and the INFORMS ISS Doctoral Consortium 2025, advancing rigorous scholarship and industry–academic collaboration.

Professor Li teaches AI and analytics across undergraduate, graduate, and executive programs. She was named a Poets&Quants Best Undergraduate Professor in 2023, received the Annual Faculty Recognition Award by The Order of Claw and Dagger at the University of Virginia in 2024, and previously received the Teaching Excellence Award at the University of Colorado Boulder in 2012. Before joining academia, she was a scientist at Microsoft, where she built large-scale machine learning/AI solutions for core products and services. She is a member of the Association for Information Systems and INFORMS.