AI Agents, Custom Bots & Vibe Coding: Inside Villanova’s Reimagined MSBAi

Hayden Coates is certain that artificial intelligence will play a big role in his future work. He already uses Microsoft Copilot as a senior operations analyst at SEI, and ChatGPT for personal research and productivity tasks. He also has some foundational AI knowledge from his 2023 degree in Business Information Technology from Virginia Tech.

But, if he is to work in data analytics/science in finance, tech, or sports, as he hopes to do, he knows he’ll need to do more with AI than write better emails or do quick research on finance or investment terms.

“I want to better understand both the ‘what’ and ‘why’ behind AI,” says Coates. “I’m now looking to deepen my analytics skills and explore how AI agents are built, tested, and applied in real-world settings.”

Coates will be among the first students in Villanova School of Business’ relaunched and newly named Master of Science in Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence (MSBAi), beginning this fall. With the move, VSB joins a growing number of business schools fully integrating AI into their analytics degrees, as opposed to adding, say, some AI electives or core modules.

The relaunch features a redesigned curriculum and an intentional focus on application over theory.

“Villanova University’s MSBAi program uses a structured approach to AI education, reflecting a logical path from core coding to AI systems.” Coates tells P&Q.

NEW NAME + NEW CURRICULUM

Villanova’s MSBA has always incorporated artificial intelligence and machine learning, says Nathan Coates, assistant professor and faculty director of VSB’s MSBA (now MSBAi). It just wasn’t branded appropriately. (He is not related to student Hayden Coates)

But, over the last couple of years, the explosion of large language models and generative AI has changed the AI landscape as well as people’s perception of it. VSB simultaneously has faculty deeply engaged in this new AI world. The school wanted to more deliberately embed this knowledge while rolling out a name that better described the degree’s function.

“So, we have a curriculum overhaul, a tools overhaul, and a rebranding that more accurately represents all that we are doing,” says professor Coates, whose professional background is in network engineering at firms like Lockheed Martin and Nextel Communications.

The result is a 30-credit, part-time program geared to working professionals. It is 100% online, and can be completed in five semesters for fall entrants or four semesters for spring entrants on the accelerated track. The redesign also eliminates electives, offering 10 interlocking core courses that faculty believe to be vital.

This core covers topics like agentic systems, AI-assisted coding in Python and R, large language models for business decision making, and unstructured data analysis – the combination of traditional text analysis techniques with modern generative AI tools.

AI & BUSINESS ANALYTICS

VSB isn’t the first business school to announce a rebrand of an existing business analytics degree into an AI degree. In 2024, Johns Hopkins’ Carey Business School changed the name of its full- and part-time MS Business Analytics and Risk Management to MS Business Analytics and Artificial Intelligence for the Fall 2025 cohorts.

New York University’s Stern School of Business did the same in August 2024. Stern was a first-mover for top business school when its 10-month, part-time MSBA enrolled its first class class in 2013. The rebrand to MSBAi was a natural response to the growing demand for AI fluency in business roles.

What is somewhat different for VSB’s MSBAi, says professor Coates, is its focus on application and adaptability.

“Our faculty is focused on setting up this program so that we are at the cutting edge of what’s being done. And one of the keys is to set up our students so they come out not only with the current, state-of-the-art skills, but are also equipped to adapt to the changes that will come,” Coates says.

STUDENTS WHO BUILD, NOT JUST STUDY

This applied focus was a key draw for Aamina Farooq, who graduated in December 2024 with a business analytics degree from West Chester University. She currently works as a business analyst at TD Bank, and will begin the MSBAi this fall.

“What stood out to me was that Villanova wasn’t just adding AI as a buzzword, they were truly redesigning the curriculum to prepare students for the real-world challenges and innovations that AI brings,” says Farooq. “I wanted to be part of a program that would not only teach the technical skills but also show how to apply them meaningfully in a business context.”

The first eight courses in the programs cover fundamentals of business, analytics, and how the two intersect to solve real problems. They also teach an ever-evolving array of tools and applications including the latest big data management and cloud analysis tools like Amazon SageMaker, Hadoop, Hive and Pig.

Students will design and deploy multiple AI agents to take on different roles and business functions. They’ll also grapple with ethics, bias, and the murky provenance of training data – where it comes from, how it’s used, and what it leaves out.

The last two courses of the program focus on applying the skills learned in the classroom: Advanced Topics is a deep dive into how AI and analytics techniques can be applied to different industries and functions – health care, supply chain, HR, and sports, for example. The Analytics Practicum is a capstone in which students act as consultants for a real company facing a real problem.

“The hands-on work, especially elements that involve AI in business strategy or innovation, is what I’m most eager to explore,” Farooq says.

“These tools feel highly aligned with where we’re headed as a society, particularly in how consumers and businesses will interact and transact in the near future. And the idea of AI-assisted coding and building custom bots is fascinating to me because it lowers the barrier to innovation. This means that you don’t have to be a traditional developer to create powerful, useful tools.”

VIBE CODING & MACHIAVELLIAN BOTS

VSB’s MSBA has always taught programming fundamentals in R, Python, and SQL, and the MSBAi does as well. The difference is that AI assistants have flattened the learning curve, making analytics less intimidating for students with no coding background.

“Programming in the era of generative AI is much different,” professor Coates says.

With AI assistants, students learn to “vibe code,” describing what they want to happen in natural language while letting the machine tackle the line-by-line coding.

This shift gives professors time to focus on more advanced and applied business problems. Students will learn to build decision models, analyze unstructured data, and apply generative AI to real-world business questions. They will also build custom bots with expert-level perspectives, drawing context from inserted data instead of relying on generic responses.

To explain custom bots, Coates often uses Niccolò Machiavelli, the 16th-century philosopher best summed up as “the ends justify the means.”

Coates built a bot trained on Machiavelli’s published works, but not all of them. Students learn how to look at a question and, using the structure of large language models, mathematically figure out what is really being asked. What are the key components relevant to the questions? Then, they learn how to feed that context to the bot.

“So you end up with a bot that’s specialized,” Coates says, a bot that will answer questions differently than a general AI model like ChatGPT. “If you ask an LLM, ‘Is it better to be loved or feared?’ it will come back and say, ‘It’s better to be loved.’

“But, Machiavelli came from a different time with a different perspective,” he says. “So, if you pass it the relevant perspective, the Machiavelli bot will say, “It’s better to be feared.’

Learn more about VSB redesigned MSBAi here.

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