Empowering the future: Microsoft Copilot and Azure AI helps guide Babson College’s AI-driven journey

In its 2024 ranking, The Wall Street Journal named Babson College, a private business school in Wellesley, Massachusetts, the second-best school in the United States. Meanwhile, U.S. News & World Report ranked Babson No. 1 for undergraduate entrepreneurship for 27 years in a row and No. 1 MBA in Entrepreneurship for 31 consecutive years.

Upon arriving at Babson two years ago, Patricia Patria, Chief Information Officer (CIO) at Babson, identified the need to modernize the college’s outdated technology infrastructure, which lacked essential capabilities like cloud services and data analytics. More recently, educators began asking for guidance on leveraging AI-driven tools in the classroom.

Patria faced challenges like limited access to copyrighted content, technical issues during testing, inadequate cloud infrastructure, and a shortage of on-site expertise to manage expedition and provisioning for student grants.

To address these issues, Patria rolled out a three-year strategic plan focused on implementing Microsoft’s cloud-first solutions, enabling Babson to provide the agility, scalability, and responsiveness needed to support its entrepreneurial mission.

“My first year we focused on improving our core infrastructure to help us get on the right tools,” Patria recalls, “Then we moved all faculty, staff, students, and alumni over to the Microsoft 365 platform. This has simplified our processes and workflows and made us more efficient as an organization.”

Modernizing Babson’s systems in August 2023 provided the foundation for AI innovation, with Microsoft Copilot and Azure OpenAI Service rolled out to all faculty, staff, and students in early 2024. This enabled students to use these innovative tools both inside and outside of the classroom. Babson went “all in” on AI later that summer, fully incorporating AI into curriculum, the student experience, and operations.

Embracing AI to transform learning and create a culture of innovation
Babson’s focus on innovation has also improved operational efficiency by expediting routine tasks for faculty and staff, freeing up time for more strategic and creative endeavors, and laying the foundation for future advancements. Additionally, the college established robust governance policies to ensure security and compliance, including one of the first AI policies in higher education to guide the ethical use of AI, particularly when handling confidential data. A key driver to this success was educating the Babson community about the safe use of AI tools and how students can leverage AI for their own learning and future careers.

“One of the wonderful things about Babson is that—because it's so entrepreneurial—we're not afraid to try stuff,” Patria explains. “We looked at our core Microsoft offerings and products, and decided to run a small pilot, incorporating Azure OpenAI into twenty different classes.”

Babson collaborated with Microsoft and partners to create customized AI-powered solutions for students. Babson develop predictive models identifying students struggling in key areas such as paying for tuition, well-being, and academics. These models provide early indicators, often within the first week of a semester, allowing the college to offer proactive support and interventions before the problems escalate. Babson also created several powerful learning tools, including Babson’s Mathbot, which is specifically designed to improve learning in STEM classes that require strong math skills.

“It’s about working with strategic partners that have AI expertise and can address our timely needs,” says Patria, “because—at the end of the day—our goal is to help our students in areas where they need it and to provide a better student experience around experiential learning.”

Student-led AI adoption
One of the biggest challenges is managing the diverse levels of AI adoption among students, resulting in varying levels of preparedness. Jonathan Sims, a professor at Babson, emphasizes the need to adapt their teaching methods to accommodate AI’s rapid integration into education.

“I came to the realization that students are going to adopt tools like AI really fast: faster than most colleges can move,” Sims explains. “Our partnership with Microsoft provides a security blanket in the sense that we have confidence that we're not informing a model with confidential data. To me, that is worth its weight in gold.”

Spencer Karns, a junior studying technology entrepreneurship and green design at Babson College, highlights how AI has increased work efficiency and access to information. “Through partnerships with companies like Microsoft, AI has become more accessible, which enhances our ability to ideate and solve problems more effectively. The core value comes down to speed, access to information, and ideation ability."

Through Azure AI Studio, students can create custom Copilots using popular models like GPT, DALL-E, and Whisper. Supported by Azure OpenAI Service, the pilot offers secure and monitored AI deployment, with Microsoft’s enterprise-grade protection.

Babson also provided $250,000 in college-funded AI grants to encourage students to build their own AI products and services. The college actively measures the outcomes of these student-driven projects to inform future initiatives, fostering a culture of innovation and entrepreneurship.

An upcoming hackathon at Babson is set to be a significant event for both Patty and Spencer. With over 300 students participating, it will provide a hands-on opportunity to explore the capabilities of Azure AI in real-world scenarios. Karns believes that such events are crucial for students to understand and utilize AI technologies.

For Patty Patria, this hackathon represents a chance to see the practical applications of AI in action and gather valuable insights that can be integrated into the curriculum and future projects. "A great indicator of how much students can do when we hand them the keys is to sit people down and say, alright, you're going to give 6 hours of your time and get your hands dirty,” says Karns.

Practical benefits from AI integration and innovation
Ruth Gilleran, a faculty member in Operations Information Management at Babson, teaches a flagship management and entrepreneurship course where students develop and then pitch startup ideas. She has seen the practical benefits of Microsoft Copilot in her classroom, using it to engage students and prepare them for their future careers.

“When you think about the journey of the entrepreneur, it makes sense to leverage this tool,” Gilleran says. “In one course we put the students into small teams and have them ideate together, only with a new team member: Copilot. After ideation, they use Copilot to generate prototype images then move into our makerspace to build lightweight prototypes before moving into market research and income statements. With Copilot, they've got assistance to help them accelerate their time to market.”

The Generator: Fostering faculty enthusiasm
To meet the growing demand for AI, Babson launched The Generator, a grassroots community that empowers faculty to explore and integrate AI with confidence. Led by faculty members like Gilleran and Sims, The Generator organizes workshops and events to educate faculty on AI tools and their classroom applications, fostering a collaborative environment.

One of The Generator’s key focuses is tool selection. Faculty collectively evaluated various AI tools and recommended Microsoft Copilot for its versatility. They emphasized using Copilot in a controlled environment to ensure data privacy and security.

“Copilot has allowed us to shift our focus from tactics to strategy, giving faculty more time for value-added tasks,” says Gilleran says.

Moving forward
Babson clearly sees excellent value in Microsoft’s AI solutions and its tremendous power in augmenting the learning experience as well as essential operations. By integrating Microsoft Power BI, for example, Babson enables leaders—including the President and the President's Council—to analyze data and gain insights without relying on manual reports. The college plans to further integrate AI into its operations and curriculum through products like Copilot Studio and other AI-driven initiatives, aiming to foster an entrepreneurial mindset and prepare students for future job markets.

By adopting Microsoft's AI solutions, Babson has cultivated a culture of innovation and experimentation, giving students the firsthand experience and skills needed to thrive in today’s competitive business environment.

“As a school that focuses on entrepreneurship, it's really important we show students how they can use AI as something that helps them enter markets that they wouldn't have otherwise,” Sims explains. “That's fundamentally game changing. And once that goes mainstream, look out big companies!”