UVA Launches Institute at Darden School of Business to Focus on Artificial Intelligence

CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., Sept. 16, 2024 – The University of Virginia today announced the establishment of the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business, accelerating UVA’s leading role in shaping AI’s impact on society and business.

The new institute will be based at the UVA Darden School of Business, enabled by the largest gift in Darden history from alumnus David LaCross (MBA ’78) and his wife, Kathy.

The institute’s launch extends and expands the work and mission of Darden’s AI Initiative, created in 2022 through an initial gift from LaCross, with support from Darden’s Institute for Business in Society and Batten Institute for Entrepreneurship, Innovation and Technology, and the Collaboratory for Applied Data Science in Business, launched in partnership with the UVA School of Data Science in 2021.

The LaCross AI Institute will empower UVA to coordinate and magnify its research, pedagogy, teaching and engagement in AI across schools, institutes and research centers.

“The LaCross AI Institute will powerfully enable the University to contribute to the greater good by building on its engagement with artificial intelligence in ways that combine UVA’s strengths and expertise,” UVA Provost Ian Baucom said. “Now is the time for institutions like the University of Virginia to convene resources and apply them to shape what likely will be the most impactful technology of our lifetimes. Building on the Darden School’s strengths in educating responsible business leaders and thought leadership on the role of business in society, the LaCross AI Institute will continue to accelerate the University’s impact.”

Well-established in everything from voice-enabled virtual assistants to healthcare uses such as AI-enabled drug discovery, AI has surged to the front of society’s consciousness with emergence of large-language generative AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini that more directly connect everyday functions of work and life with the technology and exemplify its immense potential to influence for good and bad. As with any new technology, a variety of ethical concerns temper enthusiasm for AI, from the reliability and quality of training data, the transparency of AI models and how they will affect jobs and can be effectively deployed alongside human decision-makers.

For research institutions such as UVA, artificial intelligence creates opportunity – and the accompanying responsibility – to participate in its design, development and deployment by:

• Instructing students and practitioners about the strengths and weaknesses of AI
• Conducting research on its wide-ranging impacts
• Development of AI-related technologies and best practices
• Preparation of students for AI careers
• Convening leaders to analyze and explore its impacts and responsible growth

For the Darden School, Dean Scott Beardsley said the new Institute represents an opportunity to combine its core strengths including business ethics, stakeholder theory and technological innovation, and apply them in an enterprise-wide approach to the promise and challenges of artificial intelligence.

“AI is already a multi-trillion dollar business, and demands comprehensive solutions. Our students are hungry for AI relevant skills and knowledge and the LaCross AI Institute can explore the business opportunities of AI across sectors and also define what ethical leadership means in the age of artificial intelligence,” he said. “Our faculty have worked for decades to infuse ethics into everything we teach and value, and this positions Darden perfectly to set a standard and example for how ethics must be embedded into the development and integration of AI in business, while also exploring the business of AI itself.”

As a technology, Beardsley said, AI has been reshaping ways that businesses create value for stakeholders and society for decades, and understanding how to create positive impact as that accelerates is essential for business leaders. The institute will create new professorships, associated courses, cases, conferences, thought leadership, partnerships, teaching innovations, numerous PhD and executive fellowships, and job opportunities at Darden and UVA.

In October 2023, Dave and Kathy LaCross announced an historic gift of $101 million to Darden, indicating their aspiration to earmark $50 million to establish a Darden-led AI institute that would collaborate with UVA schools and initiatives working in a similar vein. The gift has since been expanded to fund professorships in ethical AI in business, including a University Professorship and a practitioner chair in AI that will allow Darden to build on existing faculty strengths by recruiting additional world-leading faculty and professors of practice to advance teaching and research.

The total philanthropic impact of the LaCross family’s AI investment at Darden now stands at over $62 million, one of the largest AI gifts to any business school in the world. Darden’s existing AI Initiative, established in 2022, is the result of a previous gift from the LaCrosses.

“The aspiration is for this Institute to facilitate teaching, research, the creation of practical knowledge and meaningful conversations that allow business and society to embrace the continued expansion of artificial intelligence in ways that account for its effect on human beings,” LaCross said. “Kathy and I are thrilled to support the University of Virginia and the Darden School of Business in this important work.”

UVA’s Board of Visitors approved the new Institute’s name on Friday.

AI already attracts considerable attention across UVA, from its impact on teaching and research to its influence on law, business, medicine, education, arts and the sciences. The Institute will convene faculty across Grounds to translate and share their expertise in topics like data privacy, data architecture, and human-machine collaboration in ways that promote the promise and reduce the perils of AI.

Among other initiatives, Darden and the School of Data Science have a flourishing partnership that focuses on intersection of data science and business, and has funded multidisciplinary AI research, convened scholars from across UVA Grounds, and engaged business leaders in dialog about ethical AI and its opportunities and risks.

“Without data there is no AI, and so the School of Data Science is delighted to be a partner in the new Institute,” said UVA School of Data Science Dean Phil Bourne. “Given our already strong relationship with Darden through the Collaboratory for Applied Data Science in Business and SDS’s cadre of AI researchers, who constantly think about the ethical consequences of such fast moving and society transforming technology, it is a natural and welcome partnership.”

Beardsley will chair the institute’s advisory council, comprised of numerous UVA school leaders.  Darden Professors Yael Grushka-Cockayne and Raj Venkatesan will serve as academic directors of the LaCross AI Institute. They are among the growing number of Darden and UVA faculty with instructional, research and practitioner ties to AI in education and business settings.

“UVA and Darden can provide insight as to how to change organizations, how to lead organizations through this change, how to embrace the technology, how to think about the ethical implications, and how to make people comfortable with the change,” Grushka-Cockayne said.

Venkatesan added: “As a global business school, if we are to train our students to be responsible leaders, then it is our duty to be ahead of the game and to be part of the conversation on how AI is going to affect business and society.”

In its proposal to establish the institute, Darden said it would be “an engine of research, teaching and engagement with practice related to ethical AI use in business and serve as a major network node at UVA connecting into other AI initiatives, centers and units across the University.”

Grushka-Cockayne said a sign of success will be evidence that the institute has enabled “a flourishing kind of research ecosystem” characterized by faculty and students collaborating across Grounds; research yielding thought leadership that helps businesses; and partnerships between business, academia and others on AI matters. She also hopes UVA’s work will benefit other universities interested in developing responsible leaders for AI.

School leaders said the LaCross AI Institute promises to place UVA and Darden at the forefront of exploration of ethical approaches that apply to the full spectrum of opportunities and risks that AI presents in business.

That includes the infrastructure and inputs that power artificial intelligence businesses to the techniques and tools that they produce, how they are deployed, managed and used by organizations and their employees, and how their impacts and outputs are measured and monitored. Darden is already launching new courses for students in its MBA programs as well as lifelong learners to equip leaders today and in the future with the tools and frameworks to responsibly lead in an age of rapid AI deployment globally.

Learn more about the Darden’s expansive engagement with AI here.

Find more information at the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business website.