Thank you, Christoph, and thank you to the colleagues of the School of Law for hosting this event. I’m glad to be here to share one project that started, actually, thanks to an AI-TDG grant from CityU. (Let me just get my slides up. Technology, not always on our side.) I will also share with you how AI actually is seen as something we need to have a lot of control over. So the outline for today’s presentation is a brief introduction. I will share the aim of the overall project that I used to start using AI in three specific courses. But since then, I’ve been integrating AI in all of my courses across two departments and also at different levels. So not only Bachelor students, but also Master students. I will walk you through the methodology I applied, and currently, I’m also working with a colleague that, actually, teaches science, and we are looking into visual literacy and AI, following the same steps of this project. Then, I will be sharing with you some findings and conclusions.

First of all, this whole idea came up when we started paying attention to what type of skills students will need to find a job after graduation in the time of AI. Everything started in November 2022, when, actually, AI was made available to a wider population. And if you pay attention to current studies that actually have been released in 2024, and even more recently, in 2025, we have seen an increase in the adoption of AI across companies. Even though, I must say, with some of the interviews that I will be sharing with you today, there is still a phase of experimentation on the use of those tools. And even though they are requiring graduates to know about AI, you will be, I think, surprised by how transferable skills are actually what stay with us and won’t change, no matter what type of tool we need to integrate into teaching.

The aim of the project, overall, is to gain insights into the current and potential use of AI in communication and marketing industries, particularly because I teach subjects related to the use of language in a business context. So I adopted a needs analysis approach, which actually refers to the technique of collecting and assessing information relevant to course design, meaning going beyond the classroom, talking to professionals, engaging with the final employers of our students, and understanding what their needs are and how we can actually integrate this into course design. I did interviews with marketing professionals, I identified relevant information, and then I integrated them into the design of some teaching materials, mainly for two classes, I would say, within a course that is actually 15 weeks. But then, that material was useful and transferable to other classes. Mainly, I focused on the project stage in the first course, “Communicating Fashion Culture”, and identified a very specific genre to work on, a press release, to have control over the tasks that I would be asking students to perform. The same methodology has been applied to “Communication Strategies for Business Projects”, even though I chose another genre, the executive summary, for a report that students have to compile. And, in the course “Fundamentals of Public Relations”, the genre went back to, actually, a press release.

What I did sequentially was to have a selection of interviewees, mainly through the network that we have at CityU. Thanks to the very strong connection we have with the industry, all of them were senior managers in communication and marketing agencies. It was a mix of corporations, and small and medium enterprises for a total of six interviews at the end recorded, about 30 minutes each. I adopted a coding scheme to annotate the different themes, and actually worked with Professor Hafner. Hopefully, you will see a paper published from it within the year. And then, after analyzing the data, I adopted an approach, which is the “Test, Teach and Test” paradigm, I actually developed activities in the classroom. And this approach allows you to actually work with activities and then co-design with the students once you get their feedback. Afterwards, I also collected students’ feedback, and I will show you what they think about integrating AI into the classroom. I think it was also very useful to understand, when they go outside and interview for jobs, what they can actually bring from our classroom experience.

These were the questions that I developed for the professionals. For the sake of time, today I’m only going to focus on three of them. Do you consider AI knowledge a must for candidates applying to work for your company? The 11th one, what type of knowledge is considered a must? And then, what are the unique skills for junior position candidates that AI cannot actually replace? The key themes that actually emerged were the importance of mindset and innovation, the continuous learning and adaptability that is needed, and the increasing value of human skills. So when I was actually expecting them to focus on hard skills and what we actually had to teach the students to be competitive, they were actually bringing me back to what we think is the core of learning, that goes beyond the type of tools that we actually need to utilize in class. Some of the quotes that I can share with you with regards to the answer to those questions are, “I think it’s not a must today, but certainly is going to be very important.” “At least, how to say, being able to use, at least, maybe one or two of these tools.” But then again, “your EQ, your empathy, your people skills, being able to work with teams.” “So I think they are really the key. Really, to kind of have critical thinking, right, or be able to think for yourself.” That means that beyond the use of AI, they are still looking at those human skills, soft skills, that we teach our students.

This content is already available through a piece that is more aimed at popularizing science that has been published by the College of Business Magazine. You can scan the QR code or send me an email, and I will send the piece to you, but basically, here is a summary of the findings of these very three questions that I’ve just shared with you as being key drivers for this project. But then, after analyzing the interviews, we had some in-class discussion about, particularly, the potential and the limitations of AI, so to develop this critical thinking towards the tool. In-class comparison between AI-generated text and human-revised versions, in-class reflection on ethical and responsibility issues related to the use of AI, and then also a meeting with professionals to actually check whether this professional was seeing those skills being developed in only one semester. Particularly, I focused, for this course, on task one, which was the analysis of comparing text, the one generated by AI and the ones that actually were previously available on the internet. So basically, what I did was take a press release and then design prompts to design the same press release, but with AI. Then, we compared the two texts in terms of content, lexical choices, and also structure. And I asked students to not only identify the differences, but also to, at the very end, compare them with the final product that companies had produced towards other topics.

The second task for them was a bit tricky to actually integrate, because, of course, integrating AI in existing syllabi means that you cannot actually change the assessment tasks. So what I did was, basically, change one part of the group assessment for which they would be allowed to use AI. In this case, students have to produce a campaign, like a communication campaign for a brand, and only one element of the final presentation and report is the press release. So actually, again, you can control their use of AI, and, at the same time, they worked in groups, and it was received positively. Because this was in 2023, not all students had the same degree of knowledge of AI or had used it before, and I didn’t want to create any type of difference in terms of digital literacy, since the tool was quite new.

These are some of the assignments that they actually came up with at the very end. As you can see, they’ve analyzed the AI-generated version. For instance, this is just an excerpt from one of the assignments. They define it as “blunt, straightforward, but actually distant”. So not being able to deploy some of the strategies that are quite specific to promotional discourse, like the pathos and the ethos, that actually turned the text into assertive, promoting strong belief and being loving and engaging towards the consumers, in this case.

And when we completed the whole exercise, which not only showed the final product, but where they also had to submit a process, I wanted to know, how did they move from the text produced through the prompts, to the final version submitted for the assignment? And some of the excerpts from their feedback were quite interesting, because the professional invited to class was saying that he noticed that students were engaging with him during the Q&A, cultivating a mindset that discerns between ethical and responsible AI use and potential harms to both businesses and society. At the same time, I received this nice message from one of our alumni that went for an interview to get a PGDE, if I remember correctly. And one of the alumni, was asked, “How would you use AI in the classroom?” Then the student was able to remember and bring the portfolio of activities that we had actually created in class. So it not only raises awareness but also provides them with a portfolio of text and activities that they could share during interviews.

Other students from different courses, as you can see, they only had to write 200 words and they focused on the limitations of AI. So they recognized that their first approach to using this fantastic tool that could change their life, is actually that they needed to go and revise because there are cultural biases, as you can see in the second one, or there are actually weaknesses that they recognize with AI. So in terms of conclusion, I would argue that besides the tool that we need to interact with, the focus of course design should still be on transferable skills, growth mindset, digital literacies, interdisciplinary learning and experiential learning. If we think of AI, it does require a collaboration with the university, the professionals, and also the students, trying to understand where they stand in terms of literacy and what type of views they are actually adopting for these tools. These are some selected references, and thank you very much for your attention.