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Teaching Marketing in the Age of AI: Simple Ways to Build Critical Thinkers

Discover how educators can adapt curriculum, teaching methods, and career guidance to prepare students for success in the AI-driven marketing industry.

  • Higher Education
  • On-demand
  • Virtual
  • Blog
  • Marketing
  • Marketing Principles
  • Education For All
  • Career Readiness
  • Artificial Intelligence (AI)
  • 60 Minutes
  • Live Webinar
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Description

As AI advances, businesses need graduates more than ever who can question, evaluate, and make sound decisions. The challenge is building essential critical thinking skills while still covering core marketing content.

Professor Joe Cannon, author of Essentials of Marketing, shares the active learning approach he uses to meet that challenge. The framework transforms traditional lectures into high impact, skill building experiences that help students master content and think more deeply about marketing problems.

The approach provides:

  • A clear, repeatable active learning framework for strengthening critical thinking without sacrificing coverage.
  • Ready-to-use activities and assignments that push students to apply, analyze, and evaluate marketing concepts—including activities that involve responding to AI-generated output.
  • Simple strategies to prepare students for the expectations of the workplace of today and tomorrow.

About Your Speaker

Joseph Cannon

Joseph P. Cannon is Dean’s Distinguished Teaching Fellow and professor of marketing at Colorado State University. He has also taught at the University of North Carolina, Emory University, Instituto de Empresa (Madrid, Spain), INSEAD (Fontainebleau, France), Thammasat University (Bangkok, Thailand), and the University of Ljubljana (Slovenia). He has received many teaching awards and the N. Preston Davis Award for Instructional Innovation. 

Dr. Cannon’s research has been published in the Journal of Marketing, Journal of Marketing Research, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, Journal of Public Policy and Marketing, Antitrust Bulletin, and the Academy of Management Review, among others. He is a two-time recipient of the Louis W. and Rhona L. Stern Award for high-impact research on interorganizational topics. He has also written numerous teaching cases. Dr. Cannon serves (or served) on the editorial review boards of the Journal of Marketing, Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, Journal of Operations Management, Journal of Personal Selling and Sales Management, and Journal of Marketing Education. The Journal of Marketing has honored Dr. Cannon with several distinguished reviewer awards. He served as chair of the American Marketing Association’s Interorganizational Special Interest Group (IOSIG). Before entering academics, Dr. Cannon worked in sales and marketing for Eastman Kodak Company.