Posted on January 8, 2026by Staff

The new degree and courses reflect the College of Business and Economics’ response to workforce demand for AI and analytics skills, and UH Hilo’s broader commitment to interdisciplinary education and responsible AI development.

By Susan Enright/UH Hilo Stories.

University of Hawaiʻi at Hilo is making a number of changes to their business programs in response ever-increasing workforce needs for people well-versed in the use of artificial intelligence.

Beginning in the 2026 fall semester, the College of Business and Economics is launching a new AI concentration in the bachelor of business administration program that formally interfaces with the university’s data science program. In addition, a new AI certificate program will be offered to all majors, and new courses with focus on the technical skills needed for the use of AI in business, governance, and science fields will begin.

This new AI program and curriculum initiative is being led by Sukhwa Hong, associate professor of data science and business administration, and Chenbo Shi, assistant professor of quantitative business analysis, who are working closely with faculty in business, data science, and computer science to support the new offerings.

“These changes are important because AI is no longer a niche or emerging technology, it’s already embedded in how work gets done across almost every field,” says Hong. “Higher education has a responsibility to respond to that reality. We’re not reacting to a trend; we’re adjusting how we prepare students for the world they are already entering.”

Hong says the biggest benefit for students is confidence and relevance.

“We want students to graduate knowing that AI will not replace them, but that people who know how to integrate AI into their work will have a clear advantage. These (new) courses help students learn how to work with AI: how to ask good questions, evaluate AI-generated outputs, communicate results, and use these tools responsibly in their own disciplines.”

New degree pathways

Coming this fall is a new AI concentration degree program, and a certificate program open to all majors.

“Together, the concentration and certificate prepare students for AI- and analytics-driven careers by strengthening quantitative reasoning, responsible AI use, communication skills, and community impact,” says Hong.

The new business analytics and AI concentration (18 credits), housed within the BBA general business program, will create a formal bridge between the university’s business and data science departments through cross-listed courses and shared requirements in R (open-source programming language statistical computing, data analysis, and visualization), Python (the leading language for business AI), analytics, and applied data science.

In addition, the current certificate in business analytics will be renamed the certificate in AI for business, with updated required courses that align with the new AI curriculum. As part of this update, a new business analytics introductory course will be added to broaden access to AI and analytics foundations.

“The certificate is intentionally designed to be accessible to students outside of computer science and business, providing a structured pathway for majors across the university — such as social sciences, natural sciences, education, and the arts — to develop practical AI skills they can apply directly in their fields,” Hong says.

New courses

The new business analytics and AI concentration is supported by a set of newly created and significantly updated AI-focused courses that reflect rapid changes in the workforce and the growing role of AI across disciplines. It’s important to note that infused into this new curriculum is a strong sense of ethics instilled in every student.

“From a workforce perspective, employers are not looking for AI specialists in every role, they’re looking for professionals who can use AI effectively in context,” says Hong. “That means understanding its limits, validating its outputs, and applying it to real problems. Our curriculum is designed to develop exactly that kind of workforce-ready mindset, where AI enhances human judgment rather than replaces it.”

Reflecting this purpose, the college is launching several courses in the fall 2026 semester.

A new general education introductory course on prompt engineering (the science of designing prompts to guide AI models), is open to all majors. This course includes large language models (LLM, which is AI capacity to process massive amounts of data) and multimodal AI tools. A key feature of the course is a community dataset project that emphasizes public engagement, communication, and stakeholder feedback, helping students connect AI skills to real-world and community-relevant problems.

“Because the course does not assume a computer science or business background, it is particularly well suited for students from non-computing and non-business majors who want to learn how to apply AI tools within their own disciplines,” says Hong.

Upper-division courses have also been modernized.

A 300-level course on applied business analytics now integrates AI throughout the entire analytics pipeline, including AI-assisted data acquisition, generative insight generation, machine learning–based prediction, and prescriptive optimization. The new course places strong emphasis on validating AI-generated outputs and code, as well as responsible and ethical AI use.

A 400-level course on text mining for social science will be retitled and refocused to cover natural language processing (NLP) and general AI in business. NLP is now found in most fields, using machine learning to generate human language for such applications as chatbots, voice assistants, and translation services. Students will learn generative AI applications in business, covering not only classic NLP techniques, but also LLM.

In addition, a 300-level course on operations management has expanded its prerequisite options to include a course on applied statistics with R, that focuses on probability and statistics, with an emphasis on applied use of the R statistical computing system. This change was requested by the university’s data science program and broadens access for data science majors, while having no negative impact on business students.

“Overall, these changes reflect the College of Business and Economics’ response to workforce demand for AI and analytics skills and UH Hilo’s broader commitment to interdisciplinary education and responsible AI development,” says Hong. “They also create clear and flexible entry points for students from many majors to engage meaningfully with AI, whether through general education, certificates, or degree concentrations.”

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Story by Susan Enright, public information specialist for the Office of the Chancellor and editor of UH Hilo Stories. She received her bachelor of arts in English and certificate in women’s studies from UH Hilo.