Texas A&M’s Mays Business School recently announced a first-of-its-kind partnership with American search engine and large language model Perplexity. It is now available to all Mays students.
The partnership is designed to give Mays students the resources to build centralized hubs of knowledge concerning their coursework and to streamline their academics. Perplexity, which operates on OpenAI’s GPT-4 engine, offers tools and functionalities similar to other AI programs currently available. By signing in with their A&M credentials, Mays students can access the platform’s Enterprise Pro features.
Enterprise Pro, Perplexity’s premium subscription model, is the AI giant’s premier business-to-business service. Designed with these business interests in mind, Enterprise Pro can conduct external research through its Bing search engine, analyze files the user submits and back up decisions with exclusive insights using proprietary data sources.
As artificial intelligence continues to revolutionize the American workforce, assistant dean for artificial intelligence Arnold Castro believes that preparing students for this shift is essential for producing well-rounded graduates.
“We’re trying to position Mays Business School and A&M as a whole to be a leader in AI,” Castro said. “We want to be known as the university that’s putting AI first and making AI-ready students.”
At universities across the country, including A&M, the usage of artificial intelligence tools and their interconnections with academia continues to be a pressing matter. While some select courses at A&M encourage students to use artificial intelligence models, such as ChatGPT and Perplexity, their usage in most courses is either limited or strictly prohibited. Currently, the university continues to work on its guidelines and ethical stances regarding the usage of artificial intelligence.
With artificial intelligence becoming more integral to the daily lives and study habits of A&M students, Castro emphasized the importance of facilitating their responsible usage.
“As soon as you leave whatever degree plan you’re in and you go into the business world, you’re going to be using AI,” Castro said. “So you need to learn how to harness the power ethically, as we have our Aggie Values that we have to follow, and you want to make sure that you can tackle whatever problems thrown at you with it in your own way. … You use it as a reference.”
Mays is currently preparing for the launch of their new Artificial Intelligence and Business minor, covering 15 credit hours of 8-week online courses. The program, developed to equip students with artificial intelligence and machine learning skills and knowledge that are increasingly important in the modern workforce, will be open for the Fall 2025 semester to juniors and seniors.
While the pilot program is restricted to 200 seats for upperclassmen, administrators plan to open the minor to all Mays students in the near future and perhaps to all students at A&M, regardless of their major.
In addition to the minor, Mays launched two new AI-focused competitions: the undergraduate business plan competition and the dissertation proposal competition. Both sponsored by the Deloitte Foundation, the undergraduate competition invites students to submit and present business plans that utilize AI to address practical problems, and the dissertation competition invites doctoral students to submit their research regarding artificial intelligence’s relations across fields of business.
Through these programs and the Perplexity partnership, Castro hopes that Mays can transform the way artificial intelligence is seen in the world of academia.
“Students are going to work with it no matter what,” Castro said. “If you go back 10 years ago or whenever the first advanced calculators came out, people were scared of it. … That’s being seen as well with this world of AI because that’s the new calculator; that’s the new tool that everyone has. It’s able to give you the answers you need immediately.”
While many administrators and students at Mays are optimistic about the initiative, some are concerned that Perplexity could inhibit learning opportunities. Management information systems freshman Marcelo Canepa is wary about its potential consequences.
“I think it’s critical that students learn how to organize information and effectively use it,” Canepa said. “When students rely on AI, they stop practicing the skills of thinking on your feet and the factual knowledge of the material.”
Despite his concerns, Canepa also acknowledges the increasing prevalence of artificial intelligence in the business world. Perplexity, though it may become a dependency for some, can create meaningful results.
“I think Perplexity could provide a good way to break down complicated topics and provide a new perspective,” Canepa said. “That method points students in the right direction so they can pursue their educational interests.”
