Before the Kogod School of Business announced its widespread adoption of artificial intelligence this past March, Kogod students Florence Vanderschueren (MS in Sustainability Management, KSB '24) and Justin Nolan (MBA, KSB '23) were already harnessing its capabilities to solve business problems. The pair were part of a team of five students who spent last fall working as consultants for a sustainable catering company to determine how AI could best be utilized in its growth. Along the way, they learned how to balance their client’s needs and goals, adapt to the rapidly changing uses for AI in business, and utilize best and grow their skills for their future careers.
“There are these very fine, subtle things you pick up from working with real clients, and you can only pick them up when you’re doing the work in the field,” said Nolan, an MBA student. “You have to really jump into your client’s world, and I think that’s not something that you can get in a classroom.”
Through Kogod in Practice, Nolan and Vanderschueren worked as pro bono consultants for HUNGRY Food Solutions, a multiservice platform for chefs, restaurants, and food delivery teams. HUNGRY was recently named among the DMV area’s fastest-growing businesses by the Washington Business Journal and sought a consulting team to help them develop tools to match that growth and continue serving their customers. Nolan and Vanderschueren were joined by Garrett Sheffels (MS in Analytics, KSB '23), Rishabh Kumar (MS in Analytics, KSB '24), and Queenal Ayaba (BS in Business Administration, KSB '24) to form a consulting team that would assist HUNGRY with meeting their growth goals, addressing pain points, and optimizing their existing practices. Kumar served as the team’s engagement manager, while the other four students took on consultant roles that encompassed duties such as researching AI opportunities, assessing the feasibility of each opportunity, and ensuring that their solutions were thoughtful and tailored to their client’s specific goals and scope of work.
“Since AI has very specific uses, we needed to make sure we were on track to actually add value in this case,” explained Vanderschueren, a student in Kogod’s MS in Sustainability Management program. “Our goal was to make sure that we were hitting pain points rather than just overfitting AI–adding it to operations that didn’t necessarily need it to be optimized.” With AI developing as rapidly as it is, it can be tempting to use it as much as possible, which makes it all the more important for teams like Vanderschueren’s to help companies avoid overcorrecting their issues with AI solutions that may not fit.
The question of utilizing the best AI options without overly relying on them was part of the appeal for Nolan. His role on the team included exploring what ideas could be implemented by HUNGRY’s in-house technology team, what would need to be outsourced, and how quickly either path would need to be taken to get results. Considering how quickly AI solutions can change, he enjoyed the challenge of keeping up.