When Maddie Jones, an information systems student at the BYU Marriott School of Business, opens her laptop to work on her homework, she often has five different AI models running at once. Although she first approached the new technology with some hesitancy, Jones—along with other students at BYU Marriott—has learned to embrace AI as a tool for learning.
“I probably represent a good amount of students who were initially apprehensive of AI and have learned to really use and leverage it,” Jones says. Originally from Tualatin, Oregon, Jones was serving a mission for The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints when generative AI models first launched. “One time on my mission, my dad told me to ‘just ask Chat,’ and I thought, ‘I don’t even know what that means,’” Jones recalls. “When I came back, I was really confused about AI.”
Jones began experimenting and developed her own preferences for which AI models to use for different tasks. She asks AI to quiz her from her class notes or to explain concepts to her—again and again. “I’m just really annoying in my chats with all my questions. It’s how I know that I’m learning,” she says.
With this new technology so accessible, global supply chain student Luke Sine is interested in how AI could change his future career. “It seemed like all of these industries are going to be changing rapidly with AI,” he says. Sine, from Laguna Beach, California, says he believes the best way to project how industries are likely to change and incorporate AI is through talking with industry leaders.
So, Sine and some of his friends created a student association at BYU Marriott, the AI in Business Society, to do just that—open conversations between students and professionals and workshop new ways to use AI. “The association’s goal is to give students that edge where they can use these tools to become the best in their profession and at the job they want to go into,” Sine says.
Strategy student Kolton Dahl has already started to see firsthand how employers are valuing the use of AI. He says that part of what led to a return offer at the conclusion of his summer 2025 internship with Walmart was a positive evaluation of his willingness to incorporate AI into his workload.
Determined to further improve his AI skills to gain more of an edge in school and his career, Dahl registered for Strategy 490R: Creating Digital Products with AI and was tasked with identifying a problem he could solve with a digital product.
Dahl, from Wendell, Idaho, thought back to his ranching roots: He recalled a time his dad tried to hire a software developer to build a site that could project potential revenues from various meat processing methods. What a professional had considered out of their scope only a few years before, Dahl decided to attempt using AI in a semester project.
“It was amazing to see how much AI could infer and do,” Dahl says. “With AI, I’ve written about 50,000 lines of code—and I’m not a computer science major.” Now finished with the class, Dahl continues working on the project and hopes to start selling subscriptions to the software in the next few months.
Dahl says he strives to be conscientious of how he uses AI: “It’s easy to offload my mental work to AI, but at that point, it’s just kind of replacing me,” he says. “I think when I can use it as a tool to accelerate how I learn, that’s when the magic happens.”