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Introducing AI in Business: Creating Value Responsibly — A Behind‑the‑Scenes Look into the Title and the Real‑World Lessons That Inspired It

A quick look at how a simple tractor safety lesson inspired the mindset behind AI in Business: Creating Value Responsibly—and why responsible use matters in the age of AI.

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Familiarity is dangerous.

When something feels normal, we stop noticing its risks. That’s true on a farm. It’s true of generative AI.

Growing up in a farming community, I took a tractor safety course as a teenager. We’d all been around tractors our whole lives. They felt ordinary. But the course wasn’t about driving. It was about the hidden dangers: exposed rotating shafts, unstable slopes, and the risk that familiarity turns into complacency.

Generative AI occupies that same blind spot today.

It’s friendly. Conversational. Seamless. But its risks are quiet: confidently wrong answers, fabricated citations, decisions made faster than they are verified, and the subtle outsourcing of judgment.

The danger isn’t dramatic failure. It’s misplaced trust.

When writing AI in Business, one principle guided us: AI amplifies judgment. If your thinking is disciplined, AI accelerates you. If it isn’t, AI scales your mistakes.

Tractor safety courses didn’t teach us to farm. They taught us to farm safely.

AI needs the same mindset. Creating value with AI requires more than capability. It requires responsibility. That is the foundation of AI in Business: Creating Value Responsibly.

Author: Patrick Johanns

Patrick Johanns is an Associate Professor of Instruction at the University of Iowa’s Tippie School of Management, where he teaches Business Analytics and Operations Management across undergraduate and graduate programs, including the MSBA capstone. With international teaching experience and a background in quantitative methods, he is a recognized leader in integrating Artificial Intelligence into business education, currently developing a new AI-focused course and new author of McGraw Hill’s AI in Business: Creating Value Responsibly. 

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