Lindner’s Applied AI Lab equips students, partners with cutting-edge expertise

The Center for Business Analytics is at the forefront of analytics and AI training and professional development. Each of the center’s public training courses has the ability to be delivered in a private setting and customized to meet organizational requirements.

Fifth Third Bank elected to use the custom option for a course that introduced its employees to generative AI, AI’s foundational concepts, prompt engineering applications, AI governance and ethics, and real business use cases.

“We wanted to be very strategic and get the ball rolling on deploying AI,” said Jonathan Paul, vice president and director of IT, AI & governance at Fifth Third Bank. “We can’t just have these pockets of AI gurus that are doing nothing but research, developing and prototyping AI, and then leave the rest of the company behind, right?”

Paul emphasized the training’s wide-ranging influence, noting participants ranged from executive leadership to early-career data engineers to employees from finance, treasury and commercial units. Over the past year, Shaffer has trained nearly 100 Fifth Third employees.

“These trainings fit a multitude of personas,” Paul said. “We took a broad stroke with this one, but you could dial it in and look at AI for data engineers or AI for business solutions, and tailor them in those ways. We wanted to be very strategic and get the organization comfortable with AI.”

Dong-Gil Ko, associate professor at OBAIS, hires and sponsors Lindner masters of business analytics and information systems students to help him preprocess data for his “Ko Lab,” where the primary research involves electronic health records.

Students learn database skills, machine learning, natural language processing and large language model techniques while executing data preprocessing work critical to Ko’s research.

Students like Jahnavi Galla, MS ’24, now a full-time senior data analyst, have supported the Ko Lab and had papers accepted into industry journals and the Production and Operations Management Society (POMS) Conference, a flagship event in the operations management field.

“Working in the Ko Lab gave me exactly the kind of hands-on experience that made me job ready,” said Galla, who presented a study at this year’s POMS Conference that explored how strong patient-provider relationships impact the way providers respond in telehealth messages. “Beyond the technical skills, the Ko Lab also helped me get comfortable with problem solving, working independently and adapting quickly.”