From Business Intelligence to Artificial Intelligence

  • Live Online
  • Top-ranked school
  • World-renowned faculty

Making Data-Driven Decisions with Agentic AI Training

AI agents that understand plain English, query your data, and deliver answers instantly are transforming how organizations make decisions. This eight-session course gives you hands-on experience building and using these tools — no coding background required. 

You’ll use AI to wrangle data, generate charts and reports, solve optimization problems, and automate workflows. You’ll learn how to build custom AI agents that connect to databases and documents, how to secure them for enterprise use, and how to develop an implementation plan for your organization.

The AI Lab provides each participant with cloud-based access to Claude Code so you can work with AI tools without installing software or subscribing to an AI provider. 

Upcoming Program Dates

11:30 am - 1:00 pm (Live Online)
 

Fall Cohort

Monday, October 5, 2026

Wednesday, October 7, 2026

Monday, October 12, 2026

Wednesday, October 14, 2026

Monday, October 19, 2026

Wednesday, October 21, 2026

Monday, October 26, 2026

Wednesday, October 28, 2026

 

This program will be delivered synchronously (LIVE) online over Zoom on each date. Each session is 90 minutes and includes instruction, demos, hands-on exercises, and group discussion.

Why Rice Business Executive Education

  • World-Renowned Faculty: Learn from expert, award-winning business school faculty who are leaders in their fields.
  • Experiential Learning: Gain practical insights through real-world applications, faculty consulting experience, and collaboration with peers.
  • Alumni Benefits: Participants receive access to future events, including executive speakers and conferences.

Who Should Attend

  • Executives and managers responsible for data-driven decisions
  • Finance, operations and strategy professionals
  • Business analysts and business intelligence (BI) teams exploring AI transformation
  • IT leaders evaluating AI agent deployment

Outcome

After the program, you will be able to:

  • Explain how agentic AI systems transform traditional business intelligence workflows and decision-making processes.
  • Apply AI tools to analyze datasets, generate visual reports, and automate recurring reporting tasks without coding.
  • Evaluate the reliability, security, and compliance of AI-generated outputs through structured validation protocols.
  • Develop functional AI applications—from predictive models to reporting tools—using provided templates and cloud deployment methods.
  • Implement AI-driven solutions within participants’ organizations to enhance analytical capability and operational efficiency.

Program Schedule

 
Session A
Session B

Week 1

The AI Landscape

  • Set the foundation: what chatbots and agents actually are, what Claude Desktop can reach in each of its modes, and the prompting habits that separate reliable results from merely plausible ones.

AI Tools

  • Work through the four tools Claude uses on your behalf — running code, searching and fetching the web, driving a real browser, and working at the command line — and the data mistakes that produce wrong numbers silently.

Week 2

Skills, Plugins, and Apps

  • Turn a repeated task into a skill, share it with your team through a plugin marketplace on GitHub, and build web apps that produce analysis on demand.

AI Agents and Security

  • Connect to your data through MCP connectors, build a custom agent with the Claude Agent SDK, and see where the risks come from: what a contract with a model provider does and does not cover, prompt injection, and data exfiltration.

Week 3

Deep Dive into Agents

  • Build and run working agents in containers — a research agent, a data agent, and a multi-agent system whose architecture makes exfiltration impossible rather than merely unlikely — then red-team them on synthetic data.

Make Your AI Smarter

  • Teach AI your own documents with retrieval, give it durable memory with a knowledge graph, build a secure personal assistant over your mail and calendar, and run smaller or fine-tuned models at a fraction of the cost.

Week 4

Decisions and Predictions

  • Use AI for optimization, competing objectives, simulation, and prediction — and learn to verify the answers rather than trust them.

Capstone

  • Pitch your AI implementation plan and get peer feedback.

Meet Your Professor

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What Participants Say

Craig Taylor, CEO of Atlas Commodities – a mid-stream energy company, shares the value of Rice Business Executive Education programs and how they’ve fueled the success of the organization’s employees.