By Demian Hommel, CTL AI in Teaching and Learning Fellow in partnership with the AI Literacy Center
As part of the ongoing Stories of AI at OSU series, I sat down with Sanjai Tripathi, an instructor of entrepreneurship and strategy at Oregon State University, to discuss how he is moving his classroom from AI-resistant to AI-integrated.
Rather than treating AI as an automated output generator, Sanjai’s practice emphasizes its role as a scaffold for systematic thinking throughout the entrepreneurial process. Below, I attempt to explain how he utilizes custom-built chatbots and sophisticated assessment tools to humanize the learning experience for his students.
The challenge: Bypassing “sloppy thinking”
The rapid rise of AI has effectively broken the traditional model of entrepreneurship education. Where we once challenged students to brainstorm novel products and conduct rigorous investigations, AI can now automate that entire workflow in seconds. As Sanjai points out, this isn’t merely a matter of “sloppy thinking”—it is, in many cases, no thinking at all. Because students can now bypass the entire cognitive process with zero effort, we are forced to completely rethink how we teach the foundational elements of the craft.
The innovation: Guided reasoning
To combat this, Sanjai developed a Sequential Ideation Chatbot. Rather than asking the bot for a final list of ideas, students must follow a specific, divergent-to-convergent process:
- Problem-first prompting: Students begin by sharing their own experiences with the AI and identifying specific problems they encounter, before any solutions are suggested.
- Collaborative ideation: The AI generates ideas on top of the student’s initial thoughts, fostering a collaborative rather than a replacement.
- Critique and refinement: The student must prompt the bot to critique their ideas, forcing the student to organize their thoughts and justify their final business model.
Reflection: Making students smarter, not dumber
Sanjai’s philosophy is built on the idea that AI can be used to either “augment” or “atrophy” the mind. By providing just the right amount of friction in his chatbots, he ensures students are “learning with AI, not just about it.”
You’re fooling yourself if you think you can stop students from using it. The job now is to show them how to think through a question in a systematic way using AI as a tool for that journey. — Sanjai Tripathi
Assessment in the AI age
Sanjai is also innovating on the back end of instructional design. He developed an AI-driven question generator that pulls from no-cost open resources to create “cleaner” exams that lack the typical ambiguities of human-written tests. He then provides students with a practice quiz bot that mirrors the style and objectives of the final exam, giving them an effective way to test their knowledge before the high-stakes assessment.
Key advice for faculty
- Don’t build do-everything bots: AI has an “attention span” limit; keep your bots focused on one specific assignment or step.
- Focus on the process, not the output: Evaluate how a student converged on an answer rather than just the answer itself.
- Acknowledge the workplace reality: In professional strategy and entrepreneurship, AI is already a baseline requirement; teaching its ethical use is a necessary service to our students.
About the Author: Demian Hommel is a professor of geography and environmental science in the College of Earth, Ocean, and Atmospheric Sciences and is an AI in Teaching and Learning Fellow with the OSU Center for Teaching and Learning. When he isn’t exploring the societal and environmental impacts of AI, you can find him DJing under the alias Dr. Gonzo or trying to graft citrus trees in his greenhouse.
Top image generated with Microsoft Copilot.
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