What You'll Learn
AI agents that understand plain English, query your data, and deliver answers instantly are transforming how organizations make decisions. This eight-session course gives you hands-on experience building and using these tools — no coding background required.
You’ll use AI to wrangle data, generate charts and reports, solve optimization problems, and automate workflows. You’ll learn how to build custom AI agents that connect to databases and documents, how to secure them for enterprise use, and how to develop an implementation plan for your organization.
The AI Lab provides each participant with cloud-based access to Claude Code so you can work with AI tools without installing software or subscribing to an AI provider.
Who Should Enroll
- Executives and managers responsible for data decisions
- Finance, operations, and strategy professionals
- Business analysts and BI teams exploring AI transformation
- IT leaders evaluating AI deployment
You Will Be Able To
- Analyze data and produce reports using AI agents, even with no prior coding experience.
- Connect AI to corporate databases so that anyone can query them in plain English.
- Build automated reporting pipelines from database to finished slide deck.
- Evaluate reliability, compliance, and governance requirements for enterprise AI.
- Deploy document-based AI that answers questions from company policies and contracts with citations.
Meet Your Rice Professor
Kerry Back is the J. Howard Creekmore Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics at Rice Business and a Professor of Economics in Rice's School of Social Sciences. He teaches fundamentals of finance and quantitative finance to students in Rice's Master of Data Science program and machine learning in finance and quantitative investment strategies to MBA students. He is a former editor of the Review of Financial Studies and Finance & Stochastics, and he has authored two textbooks and numerous articles in leading finance and economics journals.
Questions? Contact Lauren Maghsoudi
Please e-mail lauren.maghsoudi@rice.edu.