Just Prompt It: How GenAI Makes Teaching Business Analytics Easier Than Ever
GenAI transforms business analytics teaching with dataset creation, analysis tools, and practical applications in the 2026 Evergreen release.
If you're exploring ways to bring AI into your business analytics course, the 2026 Evergreen release of Introduction to Business Analytics by Professors Vernon J. Richardson and Marcia Weidenmier Watson offers a practical and accessible starting point.
GenAI helps instructors teach business analytics—just prompt it: “How can AI help teach business analytics?”
My favorite use of GenAI is creating data. For years I struggled finding datasets. Now I just prompt GenAI:
“Please create a dataset with 1,000 sales transactions with random dollar amounts spread randomly throughout a year. The data should contain a customer name, transaction date, transaction amount, and unique customer ID. Also, please have some customers make multiple purchases during the year.”
GenAI magically creates a dataset.
To download the file with the paid version of GenAI, prompt:
“Please create an Excel file of the dataset.”
Students can then upload this file to Excel or GenAI for analysis.
In GenAI, students can prompt for descriptive statistics, cohort analysis, data visualizations, and other analysis. Prompting GenAI with “What other types of analysis do you suggest?” helps brainstorm other ways to analyze the data.
If you don’t have the paid version of GenAI, GenAI can still help you teach analytics. You can demonstrate how to analyze generated data to the class. Or, have students generate their own data and analysis, turning in screenshots for a grade.
Or, find problems that don’t require a huge dataset—just a few facts. For example, a breakeven analysis only requires sales price, variable cost, and fixed cost.
Need more examples? Just prompt GenAI:
“Generate a list of business problems that require five data points or less to solve.”
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.
