Platt is leading the Business of Applied Artificial Intelligence Minor at Quinlan and said students in the program will get detailed and broad technical preparation in AI. “We’re teaching them what machine learning is, what deep learning is, what generative AI is,” he said. “The science is changing every day.” 

The program will prepare what Platt calls translators, people with the technical expertise to work with AI, and round out their skills with the business know-how to achieve strategic objectives for companies. “The goal is for students to help articulate the AI strategy, communicate that to the engineers, communicate that through the organization, and understand the key issues around AI,” he said.  

For the capstone course of the Business of Applied Artificial Intelligence Minor, Platt and his students partner with a company to address its business challenges with innovative solutions. It’s a chance for students to exercise the technical skills, business acumen, and critical thinking they have developed in the classroom. The partner company benefits from the fresh thinking and creativity the students bring and can experiment with new possibilities to employ AI in their projects.  

Platt explained the students in the capstone will go through a real-world use case for the partner company. “We’ll begin by defining the project, creating an extremely detailed scope of work, and then move on to data selection, data cleaning, data processing, data dictionaries, data schemas, feature engineering, the whole nine yards,” he explained.  “Then we work on the architecture, which will be very complex, combining LLMs and knowledge graph databases along with vector databases. And so not only does it give students pragmatic experience, but we're kind of on the bleeding edge of experimenting. It’s great exposure for the students on how to build these things.”

To further expand the AI curricula at Loyola and prepare students for a rapidly shifting future, the university will launch a new Interdisciplinary Artificial Intelligence and Human Flourishing Minor in fall 2026, co-led by the computer science and philosophy departments.   

Social justice is a key feature of AI training at Loyola, and bias is one of the major issues facing AI. For instance, if a dataset used to train an algorithm is not carefully curated and inclusive, the outputs can be skewed and lead to inequalities.  

To sharpen his students’ awareness of these issues, Platt employs probing case studies. “Let’s say you’re running a predictive algorithm to process mortgage applications,” Platt posited. “Someone submits an application who lives in a certain ZIP code. Unbeknownst to the AI modeler, that happens to be an economically challenged area, and the application is denied.”  

Platt explained that there is always a black box problem with AI—users can’t know the full reason for a complex algorithm’s output. “But you have to look at the data you’re feeding it and think critically and logically about it. If you can’t get diverse and equitable data, you have to make a choice: either don’t use the algorithm or find ways to expand your sample data.” 

Loyola’s scholarly focus on AI ethics places it in a rare position among universities as a moral authority, well-positioned to steer the broader philosophical debate and address threats the technology poses to everything from privacy and data security to job security, academic integrity, and human dignity. The emphasis aligns with the university’s Jesuit philosophy, as well as its commitment preparing students for the working world.  

Students taking AI courses at Quinlan have impressed business leaders with their depth of knowledge. “My students go out on interviews and they say they're taking this minor, they're taking one of our AI courses, and employers say, ‘I’ve never heard of that,’” Platt reported. “It really sets our students apart in the employment environment.”