�鶹��Ƶ

The Martha and Spencer Love School of Business hosted the Business Analytics Summit on Oct. 29 in LaRose Digital Theatre in the Koury Business Center. This year’s theme was “Future of Analytics: Driving Career Success Through Responsible AI and Analytics.”

The summit brought students, faculty and industry professionals together for student sessions, a data challenge, poster presentations and an industry panel.

During a student session on responsible AI, �鶹��Ƶ alumnus Peyton Pesavento ’23, an enterprise AI strategy consultant at Accenture, urged students to understand a problem before asking AI to help solve it.

“Frame the real problem,” Pesavento said. “Don’t just tell the AI, ‘Hey, I’m trying to do this. Help me figure it out.’”

Pesavento presented with Accenture colleague Jared Skinner, a tech strategy senior manager. The speakers encouraged students to check the information they give AI, question its responses and bring examples of their work to job interviews.

In a second student session, Beca Mayr, vice president of talent acquisition at Sedgwick, shared how she combined her human resources experience with technical skills to build AI agents that support recruiting.

Students shared their own work during a networking lunch and poster session judged by members of the Center for Applied Analytics and AI Advisory Board. Takoda Moore ’27 and Sebastian Zucker-Malone ’27 earned first place for their market basket analysis project. Samantha Owens ’28 received second place for a project examining AI in hospitals.

For the Data Challenge, student teams used public data about housing and development in Alamance County. Four finalists presented findings drawn from building permits, tax parcels, municipal boundaries and other sources.

Moore, a financial technology major, and Zucker-Malone, a computer science major, joined Shayne Goldstein ’28, a computer science major, to win first place.

Their team initially tried to predict where development would occur. When their models failed to outperform a simple baseline, they changed their question to examine where development was least likely.

Carmine Familletti ’27, a finance major, and Carter May ’28, a finance and entrepreneurship and innovation major, placed second.

Third place went to Zach Conklin ’28, a finance and entrepreneurship and innovation major; Hodge Burkhardt ’27, a business analytics major; and Christopher Guider ’29, a business analytics and economics major.

The afternoon industry panel featured Elin Walton, vice president of marketing at Franzy; April Frazer ’03, CFO for corporate & investment bank at Wells Fargo; Brandon Richard, senior vice president at The Link Group; Jackie Tynan, data analytics manager for the City of Charlotte; and Steven Chen, head of services supply chain at Lenovo.

Richard discussed how his company is helping newer employees use AI while continuing to develop critical thinking and client relationship skills.

Frazer described how AI could help her team spend less time gathering financial information and more time investigating what the numbers mean. She also recalled challenging an AI tool after it provided incorrect information about Wells Fargo’s earnings.

“And you’ve got to make sure you’re testing it and you start to challenge it,” Frazer said.

Walton emphasized that people create value through how they use the technology.

“I believe it’s the humans using the technology who are creating the value,” Walton said. “But it also puts a different responsibility on the user as well, to provide the right context and the right data and the right information.”