Marketing Professor, Students Present on AI to Professionals at AMA Pittsburgh Conference

AI tools can be a great help in making your workflow more efficient, but without knowing the fundamentals of your profession they can only get you so far.

That’s what Associate Professor of Business and Marketing Rachel Kaplan teaches her students in the undergraduate and MBA programs at Seton Hill University.

This April, Kaplan worked with May graduates Bridget Joyce and Brooke Martin to create presentations that covered three different ways to interact with AI systems: NotebookLM/Gemini, ChatGPT, and Claude. The two undergraduate students presented alongside their professor during a panel about the use of AI tools for marketing professionals at the inaugural American Marketing Association Pittsburgh Conference.

“These students not only taught people how to use these AI tools, they served as a poignant reminder of how Seton Hill encourages ethical approaches to everything, including AI,” Kaplan said. “All of our students - and working professionals - are learning these tools in real time so we are all learning from each other.”

Their presentation filled up (more seats had to be added) and they ended up talking to a full room of marketing practitioners about the ways they found to use AI.

Kaplan covered how NotebookLM can be used as a learning platform for multimodalities, taking large documents and creating different formats to help process the information, such as a mind map, poster or podcast. She also noted how the tool integrates with Gemini where you can take this information to create graphics for a poster presentation.

Bridget talked about how she uses ChatGPT in her workflow to create a conversation that allows the chatbot to give ideas based on a branding message and graphic standards, and incorporate personalization to reach specific targeted demographics at a level previously not feasible with standard tools.

Brooke talked about how she uses Claude to analyze data sets and create stories based on the data. Using a fictitious data set, she showed there was a high level of churn among Gen Z consumers and asked what strategies an organization could utilize to better connect with their audience. While some data sets may initially just look like a bunch of numbers, Brooke showed how Claude can help form a coherent narrative and translate numbers into actionable words.

“The basics of marketing aren't changing. Understanding your consumer, understanding demographic marketing – these are all principles you need to understand with or without these tools,” Kaplan said. “What students and new marketers need to know is that they have to learn everything that they had to learn prior to ChatGPT or Claude being invented. Once you have the general ideas, you can use these tools to enhance your campaigns.”

The three also got to hear from local marketers about what it’s like to run a brand in an oversaturated marketing environment with constantly changing technology, a world the students are now entering after graduating this spring. Bridget is starting a job at the University of Pittsburgh as a communication specialist with Pitt Global and will be pursuing her MBA at Seton Hill, while Brooke will be working at Bose Corporation as an Automotive Sales Enablement and Marketing Operations Co-op.

“The opportunities these students have had at Seton Hill have prepared them to speak in front of audiences with confidence and convey messages in a succinct and clear manner. This is a skill set that is learned by doing and with all of their experiences out of the classroom, these students have really honed in on their presentation skills,” Kaplan said. “In a world of artificial intelligence, authentic connection is everything. We are talking about all these artificial connections and tools, but being able to get up in front of an audience and connect to others is a skill that will never be replaced.”