Business AI is a newly emerging and exciting field that integrates Artificial Intelligence (AI) into core business strategies, focusing on enhancing operational efficiency, decision-making, and market performance. It goes beyond traditional AI's technical metrics, aiming to boost revenue, customer satisfaction, and competitive advantage. This approach embeds AI into the organisational culture and strategic planning, measuring success by its tangible impact on business outcomes and customer experiences.
Our Vision
Our vision is to be a ferociously curious, bold and courageous global leader in Business AI research, innovation and education.
Our core values are diversity and inclusion. We believe that Business AI must be safe, accessible and serve all its stakeholders. It must be fair, reliable, trustworthy and easy for people to use and understand.
Our mission is to unlock the benefits of safe, responsible and equitable Business AI.
Our Research
We exist to address the grand challenges facing humanity. We focus on Business AI and People; Business AI Strategy and Innovation; Safe, Equitable and Responsible Business AI. We make a difference by reducing the risks of Business AI and unlocking its benefits.
The lab has more than 80 academic leaders across the entire UNSW Business School. We have world-leading expertise in economics, risk, insurance, management, governance, marketing, banking, finance, accounting, auditing, taxation, performance measures, information systems and technology management. We are also a friendly enabling gateway to the rest of UNSW's globally recognised knowledge and expertise.
How to Collaborate with Us
Business plays a critical role in our society. The UNSW Business AI Lab addresses the barriers, pain points, risks and challenges that industry, government, and civil society face in deploying Business AI.
A Message from the Dean
Over the past two years, we've watched artificial intelligence move from an interesting experiment to a genuine determinant of how organisations compete, hire and make decisions. The Business AI Lab is our response to that shift, a standing commitment from UNSW Business School to help business, government and our own graduates make sense of what AI actually changes.
Our focus is on the organisational side of AI: how businesses adopt it, govern it responsibly, and turn it into real decisions, real productivity and real value.
And we've already begun to make progress. In partnership with leading academics and industry, we:
- introduced a new AI in Business and Society major, so students graduate fluent from day one
- are co-creating the future of AI-enabled work with industry partners, building a shared library of real cases on how work practices actually change when AI is introduced well
- are building new qualifications for professionals already mid-career, because most of the workforce that will be affected by AI has already left university, and upskilling can't wait for the next generation to arrive
- are generating new evidence, grounded in what's happening inside real organisations, on how AI is impacting decisions, work and organisations, and sharing it in forms that other academics, businesses and policymakers can use
That gives shape to four areas we're focusing on first.
Higher Education
AI has made knowledge itself more accessible. We've introduced a new AI in Business and Society major, reconsidering curriculum, teaching methods and assessment more broadly, to make sure our graduates are fluent in judgment, commercial acumen and human skills and prepared for the AI-enabled workforce.
Research
Teaching and research are the two things a business school exists to do well. We're generating new evidence, grounded in how knowledge workers and organisations are actually using AI. We're translating that work into guidance that other academics, businesses and policymakers can genuinely use.
Business Value
Turning AI investment into real value is still an open problem for most organisations. We're working directly with industry partners to co-create the future of AI-enabled work: convening the people actually doing this inside their organisations, building a case library grounded in what's working and what isn't, and translating that into practical frameworks.
Workforce Upskilling
The workforce currently in the labour market is already feeling the effects of AI. UNSW has set itself the goal of equipping up to a million lifelong learners, and we're partnering with industry to build the learning experiences and qualifications that knowledge workers, from new graduates to senior leaders, will need to stay capable and employable as AI reshapes how their work gets done.
We're building the Business AI Lab in the open, testing ideas with real partners early, and adjusting as we learn what actually helps. If you're an academic, an employer or a policymaker who wants to be part of that work, I'd genuinely like to hear from you.
Professor Paul Andon Dean, UNSW Business School