College of Hospitality, Retail and Sport Management | May 2026

INTRODUCTION

Welcome to the May 2026 edition of our AI and Innovation Newsletter! This edition includes updates in AI, highlights faculty and staff AI use cases, and shares useful resources and information to help integrate AI into your work.

QUICK UPDATE

Dean’s Innovation Fund — Spring 2026 Winners

Congratulations to the Innovation Fund winners for Spring 2026!

Fang Meng – "Capturing Serendipity in Hospitality and Tourism: Field Experiments and Biometric Insights into Consumer Experience"

Young Lee, Joohyung Park, Jung-Hwan Kim – "Strategic Refinement of Retailing/Fashion Merchandising Programs and Curricula"

Kun Chang, Nicholas Watanabe – "From Construction to Connection: Psychological Ownership and Emerging WNBA Identification through Active Digital Exposure in NBA2K"

Applications will open for the fall cycle in September.

AI FACULTY DIRECTOR NOTES

Teaching and learning with AI

As artificial intelligence (AI) continues to evolve, educators are struggling to adapt teaching and learning. The gap exists between students’ needs and what educators are delivering. Students need to understand why learning about AI is important for their careers. At the same time, instructors struggle with teaching students’ critical thinking skills when AI can generate reports. A better approach is to develop collaborative learning assessments using AI.

How is AI affecting higher education?

Educators are concerned that AI impedes critical thinking development and tempts students to cut corners. A recent national survey of 3,000 faculty reports that 74% believe their students are using AI to write papers or reports (College Board, 2026). Turnitin reports 22 million out of the 200 million reports reviewed show signs of AI-writing and 6 million of those documents appear to be 80% or more AI-written (Harris, 2025). At USC, the Office of Student Conduct and Academic Integrity (2026) reports AI-related cases are greater than previous years (288 in 2024; 188 in 2025), and the total does not include the last few weeks of the present term. The evidence suggests that many educators view AI use by students as harmful rather than helpful.

Why do students need AI literacy?

Another challenge is that students may not understand why AI literacy is necessary. In the 1980s, the same argument might have been made about personal computers. Can you image operating a business without a computer? Further, our industries are adapting. For example, WalMart now offers AI training to its entire workforce (Zetlin, 2026). Looking ahead, employers will expect recent graduates to have some AI proficiency. Without AI skills, finding a good job will become more difficult. A LinkedIn and Microsoft study reports that 71% of respondents are more likely to hire someone with AI skills over someone with more work experience (Lazzaro, 2025).

What can we do?

Students need to know proper use of AI for their careers, but some educators are recalibrating assessments to limit AI use by students. Instructors concerned about how AI affects learning either prohibit AI use or limit the usage to specific functions. For Option 1, educators are redesigning courses to make AI use more difficult. For example, in-class writing assignments are making a resurgence. Some instructors have started using oral exams to test student knowledge (Gecker, 2026). Designing assessments to limit student use of AI may work to some extent, but students will still use AI. Also, banning AI use does not help students prepare for a workforce that will require AI skills.

Option 2 is to limit AI to specific functions or assignments. Proper AI use depends on the learning outcome, but one possible use is for students to critique their own assignments. Asking for feedback on a report’s writing flow, clarity or conciseness may be acceptable use; however, using GenAI to generate the report is not. At HRSM, instructors are encouraged to adopt BoodleBox as a learning tool. BoodleBox’s classroom feature allows instructors to develop assessments using GenAI. Within the assignment folder, students complete the assessment, and the instructor can review the students’ prompt engineering skills. This academic year, course adoption is increasing (see Table 1), but the aim is to encourage AI-related assessments in at least 40% of the College’s courses to help prepare students for their careers.

Table 1 HRSM courses with GenAI assignments using BoodleBox 2025-26

One novel use of BoodleBox is to create simulations for students. For example, paste the following link into BoodleBox to try a simulation built for students. Simulations are not too difficult to create, and they can be revised each term. In BoodleBox’s classroom setting, instructors can see how students perform in the simulation. AI technology is changing rapidly. To prepare students for their careers, we need to develop assessments that encourage best uses for AI. Instructors who need assistance designing AI assessments are encouraged to contact me for assistance.

-Drew Martin, Ph.D.

AI IN THE CLASSROOM

Assistant Professor Md. Rafiqul Islam Rana

In RETL 535: Retail Logistics, Masters of Retail Innovation students engaged with LogiTail535, an interactive simulation bot designed to bring retail logistics decision making to life through a realistic, product-based business scenario. The purpose of the bot was to help students move beyond passive learning by applying course concepts such as inventory planning, transportation trade-offs, warehousing, reverse logistics, service performance, and supply chain risk in a dynamic decision environment. By working through the simulation, students practiced calculations, evaluated multiple strategic options, and defended their recommendations as if they were real logistics analysts supporting a hybrid retailer. The experience benefited students by strengthening analytical thinking, connecting theory to practice, and giving them a more hands-on understanding of how retail logistics decisions affect cost, service, risk, and sustainability in an omnichannel setting.

In RETL 465: Global Sourcing in Retail and Fashion

Students used AI across a semester-long series of projects developed as part of the Cotton in the Curriculum grant funded by Cotton Incorporated. In the first project, students compared cotton sustainability claims generated by tools such as ChatGPT, Claude, and Gemini, then verified those claims using vetted Cotton Inc resources to distinguish accurate information from misinformation and missing context. In the second project, students used Copilot to support analysis of retail audit data, generate visualizations, and identify patterns related to cotton content, pricing, sourcing, and sustainability claims across fashion retail channels. Overall, AI was used not as a final authority, but as a tool to help students build critical thinking, data analysis, and evidence-based sourcing skills.

Associate Professor Scott Taylor, Jr.

In HTMT 537: Social & Cultural Issues in Hospitality & Tourism

Students have been gaining hands-on experience with AI-assisted writing through F&BProf, a custom AI bot built specifically for food and beverage research and academic writing. Rather than simply generating content, students use F&BProf as a collaborative partner—receiving feedback on drafts, refining arguments, strengthening literature reviews, and learning to critically evaluate AI-generated suggestions. This approach teaches students not just *what* to write, but *how* to think critically about their writing process while leveraging cutting-edge technology. By working alongside F&BProf, students develop both their academic writing skills and their AI literacy—preparing them to be thoughtful, strategic users of generative AI in their future careers. The result has been stronger papers, more confident writers, and students who understand AI as a tool to enhance (not replace) their own expertise.

AI RESOURCE SPOTLIGHT

UPCOMING PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT

Thank you for reading this month's AI and Innovation Newsletter. Stay tuned for more AI and Innovation updates by visiting the Office of Innovation webpage.