CHARLOTTESVILLE, Va., September 16, 2024 – The University of Virginia today announced the creation of the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Businessthereby accelerating UVA’s leading role in defining the impact of AI on society and business.
The new institute will be based at the UVA Darden School of Business, made possible by the the greatest gift in the Darden story of alumnus David LaCross (MBA ’78) and his wife, Kathy.
The launch of the institute extends and expands the work and mission of Darden’s AI Initiative, established in 2022 through an initial grant 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 enable UVA to coordinate and amplify its research, pedagogy, teaching and engagement in AI across schools, institutes and research centers.
“The LaCross AI Institute will enable the university to make a meaningful contribution to the greater good by building on its commitment to artificial intelligence in a way that combines UVA’s strengths and expertise,” said UVA Provost Ian Baucom. “Now is the time for institutions like the University of Virginia to pool resources and apply them to shape what will likely be the most impactful technology of our lifetimes. By leveraging the Darden School’s strengths in developing responsible business leaders and thought leaders 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-activated virtual assistants to medical applications such as AI drug discovery, AI has become a major societal concern with the emergence of extended-language generative AI models like ChatGPT and Gemini, which more directly connect everyday functions of work and life to technology and illustrate its immense potential to influence for good and ill. As with any new technology, there are a variety of ethical concerns that temper enthusiasm for AI, from the reliability and quality of training data to the transparency of AI models and how they will affect jobs and can be effectively deployed alongside human decision-makers.
For research institutions like UVA, artificial intelligence creates the opportunity – and the responsibility that comes with it – to participate in its design, development and deployment by:
- Educating students and practitioners on the strengths and weaknesses of AI
- Conduct research on its broad impacts
- Development of AI technologies and best practices
- Preparing Students for AI Careers
- Bringing together 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-billion dollar business and requires holistic solutions. Our students are hungry for AI skills and knowledge, and the LaCross AI Institute can explore the business opportunities for AI across industries and also define what ethical leadership means in the age of artificial intelligence,” he said. “Our faculty has worked for decades to embed ethics into everything we teach and value, and this uniquely positions Darden to set a standard and example for how ethics should be integrated into the development and integration of AI into businesses, while also exploring the AI industry itself.”
As a technology, Beardsley said, AI has been reshaping how businesses create value for stakeholders and society for decades, and understanding how to create positive impact as it accelerates is critical for business leaders. The institute will create new chairs, associated courses, cases, conferences, thought leadership, partnerships, educational innovations, numerous doctoral and executive fellowships, and employment opportunities at Darden and UVA.
In October 2023, Dave and Kathy LaCross announced a historic $101 million gift to Darden, signaling their aspiration to dedicate $50 million to create a Darden-led AI Institute that would collaborate with UVA schools and initiatives working toward the same goal. The gift has since been expanded to fund chairs in ethical AI in business, including a university chair and a practitioner chair in AI that will allow Darden to build on existing faculty strengths by recruiting additional leading faculty and faculty to advance teaching and research.
The total philanthropic impact of the LaCrosse family’s investment in AI at Darden now stands at more than $62 million, one of the largest AI gifts to a business school in the world. Darden’s existing AI initiative, established in 2022, is the result of a previous gift from the LaCrosses.
“The goal of this institute is to facilitate teaching, research, practical knowledge creation, and constructive exchanges that enable business and society to embrace the continued expansion of artificial intelligence in ways that take into account its impact on humans,” LaCross said. “Kathy and I are thrilled to support the University of Virginia and the Darden School of Business in this important work.”
The UVA Board of Visitors approved the name of the new institute on Friday.
AI is already garnering considerable attention at UVA, from its impact on teaching and research to its influence on law, business, medicine, education, the arts and sciences. The Institute will bring together faculty from across fields to translate and share their expertise in areas such as data privacy, data architecture and human-machine collaboration in ways that advance the promise and reduce the dangers of AI.
Among other initiatives, Darden and the School of Data Science We have a thriving partnership that focuses on the intersection of data science and business, and has funded multidisciplinary AI research, brought together academics from across the UVA campus, and engaged business leaders in dialogue about ethical AI and its opportunities and risks.
“Without data, there is no AI, which is why the School of Data Science is thrilled to partner with the new Institute,” said Phil Bourne, dean of UVA’s School of Data Science. “Given our already strong relationship with Darden through the Collaboratory for Applied Data Science in Business and the group of AI researchers at SDS, who are constantly thinking about the ethical implications of rapidly evolving and society-transforming technology, this is a natural and welcome partnership.”
Beardsley will chair the institute’s advisory board, which is comprised of many UVA school leaders. Darden Professors Yaël Grushka-Cockayne And Raj Venkatesan They will serve as academic directors of the LaCross AI Institute. They are among a growing number of Darden and UVA faculty with teaching, research and practice ties to AI in education and business.
“UVA and Darden can provide insights into how to change organizations, how to guide them through that change, how to embrace technology, how to think about the ethical implications and how to make people comfortable with change,” Grushka-Cockayne said.
Venkatesan added: “As a global business school, if we want to educate our students to become responsible leaders, it is our duty to be ahead of the curve and part of the conversation about how AI will impact business and society.”
In his proposal for the institute, Darden said it would be “an engine for research, teaching and engagement in practice related to the ethical use of AI in business and would serve as a major network node at UVA connecting to other AI initiatives, centers and units across the University.”
Grushka-Cockayne says the institute’s success will be determined by its demonstration of creating a “thriving research ecosystem” characterized by collaboration between faculty and students within Grounds, research that generates thought leadership that helps businesses, and partnerships between businesses, academia and others on AI issues. She also hopes that UVA’s work will benefit other universities interested in developing responsible AI leaders.
School leaders said the LaCross AI Institute promises to place UVA and Darden at the forefront of exploring ethical approaches that apply to the full range of opportunities and risks that AI presents in business.
This includes the infrastructure and inputs that power AI companies, the techniques and tools they produce, how they are deployed, managed, and used by organizations and their employees, and how their impacts and outcomes are measured and monitored. Darden is already launching new courses for its MBA students as well as lifelong learners to equip today’s and tomorrow’s leaders with the tools and frameworks needed to lead responsibly in the era of rapidly deploying AI on a global scale.
Learn more about Darden’s growing commitment to AI here.
Find more information on the LaCross Institute for Ethical Artificial Intelligence in Business website.
