As the first department in the Farmer School of Business to participate in Miami University’s AI in the Majors integration process, accountancy faculty have implemented classroom activities to prepare students for an AI-enabled working environment. The overall learning objective is for students to ethically use AI to improve workflows and enhance data-driven decision-making in accounting and business contexts.
A capstone project embodies this objective. Students in ACC 495/595, Accounting Analysis, taught by Professor Yibo (James) Zhang, were asked to prepare a comparative analysis for a public company that is considering entering a new industry. Working in groups, students chose the public company and brainstormed its possible strategic directions. Their selections included Starbucks, Spotify, and Costco. The teams then took their ideas to AI, interacting with it using the Person, Task, and Environment (PTE) framework, to identify viable new ventures for the company.
Students recorded their interactions with AI in a prompt engineering file, documenting how they refined, evaluated, and synthesized the solutions AI presented along with their team’s input. Students learned how to organize their answers in creative ways, such as using evaluation tables based on the quality of AI answers and flowcharting that depicts their thought processes with AI.
Finally, they prepared slides and presented their industry analyses to the class, with Kyle Brogan ’25 from PwC serving as judge. “Compared to what I did about a year ago for this exact same project, this group of students have done a lot better work with AI and delivered much better presentations,” he remarked.
By combining AI-assisted analysis with teamwork, research, and professional presentations, the capstone gave students experience that closely mirrors the consulting projects they will encounter in their careers.
