Villanova MSBAI students apply AI tools such as large language models and custom bots to real business problems. Online programs provide flexibility for working professionals. Courtesy photos.
Hayden Coates is confident that artificial intelligence will play a major role in his future work. He already uses Microsoft Copilot as a senior operations analyst for SEI and uses ChatGpt for personal research and productivity tasks. He also has some basic AI knowledge from his 2023 degree in Business Information Technology at Virginia Tech.
But if he wants to work in financial, technology, or sports data analysis/science, as he wants, he knows he needs to do more with AI than writing a better email or doing a quick research into finance or investment terms.
“I want to better understand both the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind AI,” Coates says. “I want to deepen my analytical skills and explore how AI agents are built, tested and applied in real-world settings.”
Hayden Coats
Coates is one of the first students at the Villanova School of Business and has been newly appointed with a Masters in Science in Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (MSBAI) starting this fall. With this move, VSB will take part in the rise in business schools that fully integrate AI into analytical degrees, rather than adding AI electives or core modules.
The renewal is characterized by a redesigned curriculum and a deliberate focus on application rather than theory.
“The MSBAI program at Villanova University uses a structured approach to AI education, reflecting the logical path from core coding to AI systems,” Coates tells P&Q.
New Name + New Curriculum
VILANOVA’s MSBAs have always incorporated artificial intelligence and machine learning, says Nathan Coates, an assistant professor and faculty member at VSB’s MSBA (now MSBAI). It wasn’t properly branded. (He has nothing to do with student Hayden Coates)
However, over the past few years, large-scale linguistic models and the explosion of generative AI has changed the landscape of AI and the perception of people. VSB is also deeply involved in this new world of AI. The school wanted to embed this knowledge more intentionally and develop names that better describe the functioning of the degree.
“So we can overhaul our curriculum, overhaul our tools, and rebranding what we do more accurately,” says Professor Coates, who has a professional background in network engineering for companies like Lockheed Martin and Nextel Communications.
The result was a 30-credit part-time program for working professionals. Online 100% can be completed in 5 semesters of fall participants or 4 semesters of accelerated track spring entrants. The redesign also eliminates elective subjects and offers 10 interlocking core courses that faculty believe are important.
This core covers topics such as agent systems, AI-assisted coding in Python and R, large-scale language models for business decision-making, and unstructured data analysis. This is a combination of traditional text analysis techniques and modern generation AI tools.
AI & Business Analytics
VSB is not the first business school to change an existing business analytics degree to an AI degree. In 2024, Johns Hopkins Carry Business School renamed full-time and part-time MS Business Analytics and Risk Management for the Fall 2025 cohort to MS Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
Nathan Coates, Faculty Director
New York University’s Stern Business School did the same in August 2024. Stern was the first registration of a top business school in 2013 when the 10-month part-time MSBA registered first class.
Professor Coates says that what’s slightly different from VSB’s MSBAI is focusing on applications and adaptability.
“Our faculty focuses on setting up this program, so we are on the cutting edge of what is being done, and one key is setting up a student’s setup as they are equipped not only to the cutting edge skills they are now, but also to adapt to the changes that are coming,” Coates says.
Students who not only study but also build
This applied focus was a key draw for Aamina Farooq, who graduated with a degree in business analysis from Westchester University in December 2024. She currently works as a business analyst at TD Bank and will start MSBAI this fall.
“What stood out for me was that Villanova not only added AI as a buzzword, but also really redesigned the curriculum to prepare students for the real-world challenges and innovations that AI brings,” says Farooq. “I wanted to participate in a program that not only teaches technical skills, but also shows how to apply them meaningfully in a business context.”
The first eight courses of the program cover business, the fundamentals of analysis, and how the two intersect to solve real problems. It also teaches evolving tools and applications, including the latest big data management and cloud analytics tools such as Amazon Sagemaker, Hadoop, Hive, and Pig.
Aamina Farooq
Students design and deploy multiple AI agents to take on a variety of roles and business functions. They also address the ambiguous sources of ethics, bias, and training data – where it comes from, how it is used, and what does it rule out?
The final two courses of the program focus on applying skills learned in the classroom. Advanced topics delve deep into how AI and analytical technologies can be applied to a wide range of industries and capabilities, including healthcare, supply chain, HR, sports, and more. Analytics Practicum is a capstone in which students act as consultants for real companies where students face real problems.
“The practical work, especially the elements that include AI in business strategy and innovation, are the things I want to explore most,” says Farooq.
“I feel that these tools are very aligned with where we are headed as a society, particularly in the way consumers and businesses interact and trade in the near future. And the ideas of AI-assisted coding and custom bot building are appealing to me as they reduce the barriers to innovation.
Atmosphere coding and Machiavelia bots
MSBA in VSB has always taught programming fundamentals in R, Python and SQL, but so does MSBAI. The difference is that AI assistants flatten the learning curve and are not intimidating analytics for students who have no background in coding.
“Programming in the age of generator AI is very different,” says Professor Coates.
With AI Assistant, students learn “vibe codes” and work on coding line by line to the machine, explaining what they want to happen in natural language.
This shift gives professors time to concentrate on more sophisticated and applied business issues. Students will learn to build decision-making models, analyze unstructured data, and apply generative AI to real business questions. Also, rather than relying on general responses, it draws context from inserted data and builds custom bots from an expert level perspective.
To describe custom bots, Coates often uses Niccolò Machiavelli, the best 16th century philosopher, “the end justifies the means.”
Coates has built bots trained with published works by Machiavelli, but not all of them. Students learn how to view questions and use the structure of a large language model to mathematically grasp what is actually being asked. What are the key components related to the question? They then learn how to give that context to the bot.
“So you’ll become a specialized bot,” Coates is a bot that answers questions in a different way than common AI models like ChatGPT. “If you ask LLM, “Is it better to be loved or feared?” it will come back and say, “It’s better to be loved.”
“But Machiavelli came from a different perspective from another era,” he says. “So if you pass on a related perspective, the Machiavelli bot would say, “You better be feared.”
Learn more about VSB’s redesigned MSBAI here.
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