The Future of Business Analytics Is Here—And It’s Powered by GenAI
Transform business analytics teaching with GenAI. The 2026 Evergreen release offers prompts, labs, and lessons to engage students in real-world analysis.
If you are looking for ways to add AI into your business analytics course, Introduction to Business Analytics by Professors Vernon J. Richardson and Marcia Weidenmier Watson can help you get started. The 2026 Evergreen release of the textbook infuses GenAI, as well as other types of AI, throughout the text.
Chapters now contain “USING GenAI” content, discussing how GenAI can be used in business analytics. For example, Chapter 5’s USING GenAI presents a series of sample prompts for performing predictive analytics in GenAI. But that is not all.
The section goes on to describe hallucinations, or GenAI incorrect answers, and how to exercise critical thinking when evaluating the accuracy and reliability of GenAI answers.
Finally, the section looks towards the future, where GenAI can enhance predictive analytics by helping incorporate unstructured data into the analyses, translating business questions into more accurate models, and explaining the results.
GenAI discussion questions, many of which contain questions about potential prompts, can also be found at the end of each chapter. Having students read the GenAI sections and try some of the prompts in class is a great and easy way to start incorporating GenAI into your curriculum.
Once an instructor feels comfortable with the concepts, it is time to ramp it up with the textbook’s GenAI labs in McGraw Hill’s Connect. Each GenAI lab outlines a business question and how to prompt GenAI to answer the question.
Learn more about how the 2026 Evergreen release can further support your classroom below:
Marcia Weidenmier Watson is the Jesse H. Jones Professor Accounting in the Michael Neidorff School of Business at Trinity University. She received her BBA in accounting from the College of William and Mary, and both an MBA in information systems management and accounting and a PhD in accounting from the University of Texas at Austin. She has taught at the University of Texas at Austin, TCU, Mississippi State University, UNC Charlotte, and Trinity University. Prior to receiving her PhD, Dr. Watson was a financial systems consultant for Price Waterhouse, now PricewaterhouseCoopers.
A member of the American Accounting Association, she served as newsletter editor for the American Accounting Association Information Systems section for 16 years. She serves on the editorial boards of Issues in Accounting Education and the Journal of Accounting Education. She has published articles in Accounting Horizons, Advances in Management Accounting, Issues in Accounting Education, International Journal of Accounting Information Systems, MIS Quarterly, Journal of Accountancy, Journal of Accounting Education, Journal of Information Systems, and Strategic Finance. She also has had several cases published in Case Studies in Forensic Accounting and Fraud Auditing.
