AI Hands-on: Students of BITSoM at its Brain Lab. They get to develop apps as part of their AI business course work | Photo Credit: Vinay Kamath

It’s mid-morning at BITSoM in Kalyan on the outskirts of Mumbai. With its 63 acres of well-manicured gardens and elegant buildings housing classrooms and hostels — which the B-school shares with law and design schools — it’s an oasis of calm off the dusty and trafficky highway. A stately statue of the Birla group patriarch, the late GD Birla, greets one as you enter. A bunch of students are gathered at the ‘Brain Lab’ on the B-school premises. A catchy acronym for BITSoM Research in AI and Innovation Lab, four batches of two students each, exhibit how the apps they have developed as part of their AI business course work.

To get hands-on experience in working with AI and garner some real-world experience, the students are required to develop bots that interface with questions from users. Aastha Pundhir and Akshaya Vijay show how the app they have developed, Ingrid, short for The Ingredient Fairy, works. For example, they explain, if one wants to know if the ingredients of a product are diabetic friendly, one has to feed in all the inputs, which is uploaded into a database, and an overall health score results, indicating if a product is safe to consume or not based on the ingredients.

Other students have developed apps ranging from Solstice AI, a solar panel installation cost analysis for Maharashtra for residential and commercial buildings; ZodiAI, an AI ‘panditji’; and Spinal Sense, an AI spine assistant which advises on postures to care. Interestingly, half the students of the BITSoM class are non-engineers, which has not stopped them from learning code to create apps. As Aastha Pundhir, a B.Com graduate, points out, it’s not just about coding but how to engineer a problem. “BITSoM is laying the foundation for AI for even those from non-technical backgrounds like me and my friends as well and we did not feel a gap in skills because of the way we are being taught here.”

High exposure to AI

Prof Saravanan Kesavan, Dean and professor of operations of BITSoM, an offshoot of the famed Birla Institute of Technology, Pilani, believes that disproportionate exposure to AI is important as the game is metamorphosing so rapidly. “The frontier keeps on moving. If you ask me to teach a course on statistics or operations, it’s fairly steady stuff, things may change a little bit here and there. But AI is just moving at such a rapid pace. So, I think it’s important for us to keep training the students because once they graduate and start working then it won’t be continuous learning. At best, they might, every six months or one year, may be take a course to update themselves. But now that they are in college, we can keep showing them how the frontier is moving, and teach them what are the different and emerging AI tools,” he explains.

Going a step further, BITSoM asked corporates to give AI projects to the students: looking for six projects, it ended up with 18 projects! “The general appetite among companies for AI is enormous. We had an employer come in recently and I took him to the Brain Lab and we were showing him what the students are being trained on. And he said, this is exactly what we do in our companies.”

Saravanan points to the example of Prof Daniel Ringel, who is visiting faculty from the University of North Carolina. Ringel, Saravanan explains, works with companies like Google and Microsoft and he’s one of those that these companies turn to before they release a product, to test it. “So, he’s at that cutting edge. As he was teaching, right in the middle of his course, Gemini 3 from Google was released and they had this new Antigravity tool. It literally dropped the previous evening and the next morning the students actually got to see what it is. This speed has never happened in education. And the reason we are able to do that is because we are pick and choose faculty from all round the world who are leaders and research deeply in that area.”

Grappling with the AI question

Saravanan says even corporates are still grappling with the AI question. They know AI is going to change organisations but don’t know how to handle it. Even for recruitment, spelling out job descriptions (JD) can be a hazard. “Earlier, if you had to recruit a marketing manager, there were say five things that he/she would need to know. The job description is like set in stone and hasn’t changed for a long period of time. Now what is the JD? They know that AI is changing. So the kinds of tasks that the person has to do is going to be different, so the JD is very ambiguous as everyday things are changing fast,” he elaborates.

“So, the only way to recruit is to take on somebody who’s open to AI, who’s got some foundation to AI and who’s willing to constantly learn and adapt. And that is a promise of BITSoM,” he adds. AI, he says, can help marketers create personas of different people for focus group discussions for any impending product launches and can be a speedier and cheaper way of understanding markets.

BITSoM has so far graduated two batches from its flagship two-year MBA programme. Prof Saravanan points to three aspects of the B-school as differentiators: state-of-the-art education, its robust visiting faculty model, and a programme called ‘winning at the workplace. “AI has created this window of opportunity for us. Maybe five years back when there was no AI there may not have been much of a difference between B-schools,” he says. Its visiting faculty model ensures that students can be exposed to the latest in trends by bringing in those faculty who can bring them up to speed.

Its winning at the workplace offers courses that are designed to improve soft skills, develop their awareness and communication. Courses cover a broad sweep, from the Constitution of India to even religion. “These are courses that are intended to broaden their minds,” adds Saravanan. With a little bit of AI on the side!

Published on December 31, 2025