UCR School of Business

AI for business. Built through collaboration.

We connect students, faculty expertise, and industry practitioners to explore how AI is transforming organizations — through faculty-governed audits, published thought leadership, and applied projects.

14projects run with industry

60+students matched to teams

100%faculty-governed engagements

Get a free, faculty-governed AI audit

We help map where AI can create real value for your organization — opportunities, readiness, governance, and ROI.

100%faculty-governed engagements

Turn your AI work into thought leadership

Co-author a case study or perspective piece with UCR faculty and students — real experience, a credible byline.

5published business cases

Put a UCR student team on your AI challenge

Faculty-guided students turn a prioritized opportunity into a working prototype, workflow, or evaluation.

14projects run with industry

Applied AI insights

Perspectives, projects, and case studies from the SoCal AI community.

For Industry Practitioners

Bring Your AI Challenge to SoCal AI

Whether you are deciding where to start, scaling existing AI initiatives, building organizational AI capabilities, or have lessons worth sharing, SoCal AI offers three ways to engage with UCR faculty and students.

Identify and prioritize where AI can create value for your organization through a structured, faculty-governed review of your business processes, AI initiatives, and transformation challenges.

The audit may examine

Process & Opportunity Mapping — Identify friction, manual effort, bottlenecks, and high-value AI opportunities.
AI Strategy & Prioritization — Rank opportunities by business impact, feasibility, and readiness.
Data & Operating Foundations — Assess whether systems, information, roles, and processes can support AI-enabled work.
AI Enablement & Organizational Capabilities — Identify the skills, workflows, management practices, and support mechanisms needed for effective AI use.
Adoption & Change — Understand what is helping or preventing AI adoption.
Governance, Risk & Responsible Use — Review responsibilities, controls, policies, and oversight.
Business Value & ROI — Define how AI impact should be measured using business outcomes.

Request FREE AI Audit

Doing something interesting, difficult, or innovative with AI? Share your AI perspective and collaborate with UCR faculty and/or students. SoCal AI gives industry practitioners an opportunity to turn real industry experience into credible thought leadership.

Potential topics

AI-Enabled Workflow Transformation — Redesigning work by integrating AI, data, knowledge, agents, and human judgment.
Measuring AI Business Value & Economics — Linking AI investments to measurable outcomes, costs, and business performance.
AI Governance, Security & Responsible Use — Establishing accountability, controls, safeguards, permissions, and oversight.
AI Adoption, Enablement & Organizational Change — Driving sustained use through leadership, training, incentives, and workflow integration.
Workforce, Skills & Organizational Learning — Evolving roles, skills, team structures, and shared organizational capabilities.
AI Evaluations, Monitoring & Reliability — Testing and monitoring AI quality, reliability, failures, and business performance.
Human-in-the-Loop Decision Design — Defining where AI acts, where humans decide, and how exceptions are handled.
AI-Enabled Innovation & New Business Models — Creating new products, services, customer experiences, revenue models, and competitive advantages.

Publish Your Thought Leadership

Move an identified AI opportunity from idea toward implementation. Work with UCR students on a focused project — prototyping, workflow redesign, or evaluation — conducted with faculty guidance and oversight.

AI Use-Case Prototyping — Turn a prioritized opportunity into a working prototype or proof of concept.
AI-Enabled Workflow Implementation — Translate redesigned business processes into practical AI-enabled workflows.
FinOps Audits for AI Agents — Examine token usage, model selection, prompts, tool calls, agent harnesses, and workflow design to identify opportunities to reduce operating cost while maintaining quality.
AI Evaluations & Monitoring — Define evaluation criteria, quality measures, testing approaches, and ongoing monitoring.
Human-in-the-Loop Workflow Design — Determine where AI acts, where people intervene, and how exceptions and escalation should work.
Evolving Organizational AI Skills — Build agent-mediated organizational "second brain" approaches in which AI skills and agent harnesses improve through human feedback over time.
Knowledge & Data Preparation — Organize the information and knowledge sources required by AI-enabled workflows and agents.
AI Enablement Tools & Resources — Develop playbooks, training materials, prompt libraries, operating guidelines, and internal resources.
Adoption & Change Experiments — Test new AI-enabled workflows, measure usage, gather feedback, and improve adoption.
Governance Implementation Support — Translate AI policies into practical procedures, checkpoints, documentation, and accountability mechanisms.

Suggest AI Project

For students

Work on real AI problems

Join the AI network once and receive matched invitations:

Industry-sponsored AI projects
Case-study and thought-piece co-authoring
Internships, competitions, and events

2-minute profile · matched invites every two weeks · UCR students only

Live pipeline

AI projects & collaborations

Current faculty-governed engagements. Enrolled students can express interest in open teams; company identities are withheld where confidentiality requires.

Applications open

AI-powered customer insights

Industry: Retail
Function: Marketing
Students: 3 needed
Skills: Analytics, GenAI

In progress

AI governance assessment

Industry: Healthcare
Function: Strategy / Risk
Students: 2 on team
Faculty: Supervised audit

Coming soon

AI agents for financial analysis

Industry: Financial services
Function: Finance
Students: 4 planned
Opens: October 2026

On campus

What's happening in AI at SoCal AI

Sep 8

AI club

Building your first AI agent

Sep 17

Industry panel

How companies are governing generative AI

Oct 2

Executive speaker

Scaling AI across the enterprise

Oct 14

Workshop

AI tools for business analytics

Participate in the SoCal AI community.

Students

Build experience by working on real AI problems with faculty and industry.

Industry

Bring us an AI problem, experience, or idea worth exploring.