Meaningful human interaction is core to business and Fuqua is pioneering new ways to strengthen it. We’ve developed capabilities that give faculty and students new insight into how ideas develop, how teams function, and how learning emerges. These tools help us better understand human interaction – making our learning environments even more intentional, inclusive, and effective. We approach this effort as a living laboratory, subject to the same data privacy protocols that govern all of our operations.
Individual faculty determine how to deploy these tools within their own courses, creating a dynamic environment where students are encountering AI in different forms and contexts. As we develop these capabilities our guiding principle is to support human learning. We are not developing AI grading tools, seeking to reward speaking more in class, or penalize quiet deliberation. As our faculty continue to innovate student learning, we are focused on how to strengthen the essence of business leadership: meaningful human interaction.
Enhanced Classroom
Fuqua offers several AI-assisted classrooms for interested professors to enrich discussion-based teaching. While faculty have always had ways to track class participation, the factors that cause conversation to yield meaningful insights – or stall student learning – are harder to identify.
Inside our enhanced classroom spaces, faculty are able to understand discussion dynamics, recognize diverse contributions, and provide more equitable feedback to our faculty at scale. While each professor uses the toolset differently, an enhanced classroom enables greater visibility for the instructor to clarify concepts and engage students even more intentionally – with the material, and with one another.
This capability also offers students an opportunity to receive an individual portrait of their discussion contribution across a term, seeing how their engagement has helped move ideas forward. Although teaching approaches are not uniform across Fuqua, their complete fidelity to Duke data privacy standards and protocols is consistent. Not all classrooms have or use AI enhancement, and faculty teaching in these spaces apply their capabilities in ways that support their teaching goals – but in all cases university protocols around student privacy, consent, and data governance remain paramount.
Enhanced Team Feedback
Fuqua has long been known for team-based learning, ensuring students work closely with peers from divergent backgrounds to negotiate assignments across different perspectives and experiences. Students learn how to draw out individual strengths and move a group toward a shared goal.
With an enhanced feedback capability available in some classes, a learning team submits an audio recording of their case discussion as part of their assignment. Students decide what to record, how much to include, and can pause or delete as they prefer. Data is pseudonymized and generates a summary: did the team engage with each other’s ideas or divide and disperse? Did the team debate alternatives or slide into polite agreement? Was speaking time balanced?
Each team receives a comment showing their data, speaking time distribution, feedback. The purpose of enhanced feedback is to provide ongoing support in skill development in areas employers consistently look for: the ability to listen, build on others’ thinking, challenge constructively, and move a team toward action. By making these behaviors more visible, we aim to support students’ efforts to become more effective collaborators – helping them become stronger contributors in professional settings.
Duke GPT
On their first day as a student, faculty or staff member, our community activates Duke’s private, secure instance of ChatGPT Edu. From then on, AI is integrated into our daily work—analyzing data, brainstorming strategy, and refining presentations.
With classmates, professors, and staff all operating in the same AI environment, collaboration is richer and more dynamic. And unlike consumer versions, ChatGPT Edu is designed for education: it protects your privacy and unlocks advanced features like data analysis, document summarization, and multilingual support.