When Patrick Johanns went looking for a textbook on responsible AI use for business students, he came up empty.
No chapters. No frameworks. No practical guidance.
So he wrote one.
“There weren’t any books out there,” says Johanns, associate professor of instruction at the University of Iowa’s Tippie College of Business (LINK). “This was our opportunity to set the standard.”
Together with Jim Chaffee, associate professor of practice in business analytics at Tippie, and Jackie Rees Ulmer, dean of the College of Business at Ohio University, Johanns created AI in Business: Creating Value Responsibly, a new McGraw-Hill textbook built for non-technical business students. It arrives in January — just in time to meet a tidal wave of curricular change sweeping through B-schools.
‘IF WE’RE GOING TO DO THIS, WE’D BETTER DO IT RIGHT’
More than just a how-to manual on generative tools or prompt writing, the book is structured to help students understand AI from managerial, ethical, and societal perspectives. And it’s already reshaping how Johanns and his colleagues teach at Tippie.
The idea for the book came in 2023, when a senior administrator suggested to Johanns that he add AI content to Tippie’s undergraduate business analytics course. Johanns checked the usual sources.
“The easy route is to see if your textbook has a chapter. Ours didn’t. Then you check the publisher. Nothing. Then you check the others. Still nothing,” he tells Poets&Quants.
He began writing chapters to cover the gap in class. As the material grew, so did his sense that this needed to become something bigger.
“Once I got a few chapters done, I realized it was shaping up into a real resource,” he says. “I’d already written one textbook, so I knew the path. And I thought, if we’re going to do this, we’d better do it right.”
What followed was months of early-morning writing, revising, and outreach. By the time Johanns found an editor who understood what he was building — a business-focused, non-technical treatment of AI — he had eight chapters in hand. Several major publishers competed for the manuscript. McGraw-Hill won out, in part because of its robust supplemental support for instructors.
Iowa Tippie’s Patrick Johanns: “At the individual level, students need to understand what generative AI is actually doing. It’s not verifying the truth. It’s predicting the next likely word. That means you have to check the output, always”
ETHICS NOT CONFINED TO A CHAPTER
From the beginning, ethics and sustainability weren’t sidebars. They were organizing principles.
“I didn’t want a throwaway chapter at the end called ‘Ethics.’ That’s what so many textbooks do — and it’s the easiest one to skip,” Johanns says.
Instead, the team embedded ethical and environmental issues into every chapter. They created a visual icon to flag these moments and prompt class discussion.
“That decision came from talking to people. Any time we mentioned we were writing about AI, the first question was: ‘Are you covering ethics?’ It was constant. That told me it couldn’t be treated as optional.”
The book includes more than 100 examples from companies around the world — many of them illustrating where ethics, governance, or unintended consequences show up in real business decisions. One case covers Charter Communications, which laid off over 1,300 employees after adopting a chatbot system.
“There are smart ways and better ways to do things like that,” Johanns says. “We want our students to be the kind of leaders who think beyond the next quarter’s numbers.”
RESPONSIBLE USE: TWO MEANINGS
The phrase “responsible use” is right in the book’s subtitle. For Johanns, it has two distinct meanings — one personal, one managerial.
“At the individual level, students need to understand what generative AI is actually doing,” he says. “It’s not verifying the truth. It’s predicting the next likely word. That means you have to check the output, always.”
One chapter offers eight ways to validate results from large language models — not just to avoid hallucinations, but to ensure the tool is actually answering the question being asked.
The second layer is organizational. Johanns wants students thinking about the business and societal tradeoffs of AI adoption.
“If you’re leading HR, and you’re bringing in a tool that automates part of the hiring process, are you also investing in reskilling? Are you thinking about job transitions, not just job eliminations?”
He also flags the energy costs of AI. “It takes 10 times the electricity to get an answer from ChatGPT compared to Google,” he says. “That’s real impact.”
STUDENTS SHOWING UP
The book’s structure is already shaping Tippie’s new MBA elective, Creating Value with AI, which Johanns co-teaches. Demand has outpaced expectations.
“We launched it last spring and had enough interest to add a second section this fall,” he says. “Even that filled quickly. So I’ll probably be teaching more of it going forward.”
He’s also working with Chaffee to retool Tippie’s undergraduate Business Computing Essentials course, replacing dated Microsoft Office content with foundational AI concepts.
“A lot of students come in already fluent with tools like Excel and Word,” Johanns says. “So we’re taking that course and turning it into something a lot more relevant. That’s one way to move faster without waiting for new curriculum approvals.”
‘THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP UP’
From the start, the authors of AI in Business knew they didn’t want to produce a static, soon-to-be-obsolete textbook. Instead, they’re launching what will be a perfect example of the “evergreen publishing model” — a system that allows for continuous updates to course materials without requiring instructors to rebuild their courses from scratch.
“Even during the copy edit stage, I had to go back and revise things because ChatGPT-5 came out,” Johanns recalls. “I had prompts and examples in the book tied to specific versions. That’s how fast things are moving.”
Instructors will be able to update materials with a single click each semester, he says. Legal shifts, model upgrades, new case studies — all of it can be refreshed without waiting for a new edition.
“We’re flagging places where the laws are changing, where the models are evolving, where new research is coming out,” Johanns says. “It’s the only way to keep up.”
And if other AI books follow at other B-schools? All the better, he says.
“We’ve seen one or two others in the works, but they’re very different,” he says. “I hope this one helps set the bar. If people want to come play in this space, they’re going to have to meet it.”
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