Most university chairs in artificial intelligence (AI) sit in computer science departments. Richard Ivey, HBA ’72, LLD ’13, thinks that's a problem – and he's putting $5 million behind a different approach.
His generous gift to the Ivey Business School will establish the Richard W. Ivey Family Chair for AI in Business, along with related teaching, research, and learning-innovation funding to help accelerate AI expertise across the School. Combined with $2.5 million in funding for the chair endowment through the Dean's Chair Match program, the total investment reaches $7.5 million.
“AI is going to impact the entire world for better or worse, and a big chunk of that will be business,” Ivey said. “Business education needs to reflect that by preparing students for this new world. That includes everything from how to use AI tools to create a competitive advantage to how to implement AI tools responsibly and ethically.”
Acting Dean Nicole Haggerty said the gift comes at an important time for the School.
“Richard Ivey's gift is a major investment in the School's ability to lead in one of the most important emerging areas in business education,” she said. “It will help us to deepen research in AI in business, accelerate innovation in the classroom, and strengthen the School’s position as a global leader in experiential, technology-enabled learning.”
Why the business context matters
Ivey said he was surprised to learn how few AI chairs at other universities are housed in business schools, even though the effects of the technology are already moving quickly through management, operations, finance, and how organizations work day to day.
“It's not just tech implementation,” he said. “AI education is needed to explore its impact on strategic decision-making, operational integration, financial evaluation, and organizational change.”
Rather than fund a single chair, Ivey structured the gift as an ecosystem of five connected elements – a choice he said reflects how the School needs to respond to AI as an institution, not through one hire.
“The goal of the chair is to ensure an institutionally integrated approach to AI,” he said. “That means not only dedicated research and faculty positions for research in AI in business, but developing AI-focused curriculum, enhancing AI-supported teaching, and ensuring AI-focused knowledge mobilization.”
In addition to the endowed chair, the gift funds the Richard W. Ivey Family Research and Outreach Fund, the Richard W. Ivey Family Teaching Scholar, the Richard W. Ivey Family Post-Doctoral Fellows, and the Richard W. Ivey Family AI Enhanced Learning Innovation Fund. Between them, they will support new AI research in a business context and the elements needed to bring that work into the classroom.
“Together, these pieces will help Ivey emerge as a global thought leader in AI in business, while delivering a more effective and engaged experience for students and faculty,” Ivey said.
The chair holder recruited will be a high-calibre scholar capable of leading a rigorous research program in AI in business, with particular attention to the ethical, legal, societal, and governance questions the technology raises. Ivey points to emerging risks such as “surveillance pricing,” in which companies use AI to charge different customers different prices based on their behavioural history, as the kind of issue business leaders will need to understand and govern.
“Because of those risks, ethics and governance and responsible investing are huge,” he said.
A teaching model built for the AI era
Ivey said one reason he believes the School can lead in this space is that its Case-Method Learning and broader experiential approach are especially valuable at a moment when educators worldwide are worrying about AI's effects on student learning.
Rather than teaching content alone, the School's approach asks students to work through ambiguity, defend positions, and build judgment in real time – capabilities that Ivey says matter more, not less, in an AI era.
“Ivey’s education doesn't just focus on content,” he said. “We focus on capabilities, from judgment to persuasion to resilience. That’s what we teach our students. We create confident, capable people.”
He sees that as a competitive advantage at a time when many other schools are grappling with how easily AI can generate summaries, draft assignments, and reduce the cognitive effort students bring to their work.
“Relative to other schools, I think there's still time to outpace our competition, especially due to our experiential learning pedagogy,” Ivey said. “This gives us a huge competitive advantage.”
The chair and related funds will build on that advantage by supporting curriculum development, faculty innovation, postdoctoral research, outreach, and the creation of AI-enhanced learning tools across programs.
Building on work underway
The AI work at the School has already begun through faculty research activities, course and curriculum innovations, and the pilot and launch of staff operational innovations. This has been supported through recent activities including the launch of nebulaONE® and creation of the AI Fellows program.
nebulaONE, launched last year, gives students, faculty, and staff access to generative AI tools in a secure environment built for business education. The AI Fellows program supports faculty experimentation with AI in case teaching, virtual reality, and simulations, helping the School try new approaches to experiential learning.
Ivey pointed to those efforts as evidence that the School is already moving with urgency.
“We've taken a good strong position in the whole AI world, and the chair will help, but we're already there with nebulaONE and the AI Fellows,” he said. “We're making great progress already.”
An enduring family partnership
His gift is part of a family partnership with the business school that goes back to its founding, when his grandfather, Richard G. Ivey, helped champion the vision of a business school at Western University, served as the inaugural Chair of the business school’s Advisory Committee, and played an important role in its early fundraising and development. Successive generations of the family have since supported the School through philanthropy, leadership, and service. Given those enduring ties, the case for acting now is straightforward.
“I don't think we've ever lived in a time of greater change. Whether it's climate deterioration, wars, increasingly dramatic wealth inequality, and of course, AI – it's hard to keep up,” Ivey said. “These changes will impact business education in spades. Ivey needs to anticipate and adapt, and then do it again and again as these changes accelerate.”
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