AI for MBAs? One Harvard Business School lecturer giving it a shot.

Students given access to coursespecific chatbot

The 250 Harvard Business School students who signed up for the popular “Launching Tech Ventures” class last fall got the usual lectures filled with case studies of startups and visits from successful entrepreneurs. But they also had access to a specially trained digital assistant to help with their coursework, one powered by the same artificial intelligence technology behind ChatGPT.

Students could ask the bot, dubbed

ChatLTV, to help with analysis of a case study, find definitions of unfamiliar terms, or even see when professors were holding office hours.

The bot was the brainchild of senior lecturer Jeff Bussgang, who developed the course and is also cofounder and general partner at Boston VC firm Flybridge Capital Partners.

Jaron Wright, a second-year business school student who took the class, said ChatLTV was almost like having Bussgang on call 24 hours a day to answer questions.

In one case study, about software firm AllSpice, Wright used the bot to help compare different sales models. “With all HBS cases, there’s no one right answer,” Wright said. “It’s not like I could just plug things in and get the answer. But it was the ability to change the variables and see what affected the outcome most. And then I got to the point where I’m actually utilizing my brain and getting past the basics pretty quickly.”

ChatLTV started out as an experiment to see if training an AI system with case studies from the class and related material would produce a chatbot worth chatting with. “I wasn’t sure it would work and I wasn’t sure it would be very interesting,” Bussgang said.

He first got the idea about a year ago while brainstorming ideas for a summer project for his college-age son. Helping dad build a chatbot ultimately didn’t appeal to the computer science major, so Bussgang recruited a former student to write the code and another to test it.

The material used to train the bot, in

cluding more than 50 case studies, two books, and numerous spreadsheets and PowerPoint decks, was proprietary and copyrighted. Bussgang couldn’t let any of it end up in the public version of ChatGPT run by OpenAI, so he used a version of the generative AI software running on Microsoft’s Azure cloud service that keeps data private. It took the team a few months to write and test about 17,000 lines of code.

ChatGPT and other generative AI apps are notorious for making up information, or “hallucinating.” ChatLTV’s code forced the bot to stick to the material in its training data. Instead of making things up, the bot offers a blank when it isn’t sure of the answer.

This month, Bussgang explained ChatLTV to the entire HBS faculty (dressed as one of his business heroes, Steve Jobs). Harvard is planning wider use of AI chatbots in other courses, according to Brian Kenny, the business school’s chief marketing and communications officer. And the university is one of many experimenting with the technology. Georgia Tech developed an AI assistant called “Jill Watson” to help online students studying computer science.

Brian Smith, associate dean for research at Boston College’s Lynch School of Education and Human Development, said he is impressed with the early chatbot assistants at Harvard and Georgia Tech. But not all schools have the same resources, he warned. And he’d like to see more research into the bots’ impact on learning.

“I can imagine someone just filling a chatbot with course content and ending up with a knowledgeable tutor that acts nothing like a good teacher,” Smith said. “I’m not sure if these are worth the cost, but it’s worth studying them to see if students benefit from their use.”

Bussgang, who first worked at startups during the internet boom three decades ago, is planning to keep using ChatLTV and is building more generative AI apps for his classes. And he’s getting the same vibe from gen AI that he got from the internet back in the day.

“It’s going to just reduce the friction and expense of doing things so much that there will be a lot of room for innovation,” he said. “It feels like every day something amazing is happening.”