During a recent visit to Athens, Poets&Quants found a Terry College undergraduate program reshaping business education through AI integration, a global co-major, hands-on client projects, and a career engine that connects students directly with employers
At the University of Georgia’s Terry College of Business, leaders talk about innovation the way most business schools talk about strategy – as something that has to show up everywhere, not just in one signature course or a flashy new center.
That means integrating analytics across the undergraduate curriculum, expanding student access to AI training, and redesigning assessment for a world in which generative tools are always within reach. It also means building the day-to-day infrastructure that helps undergraduates translate opportunity into internships, offers, and confidence.
“We’re going to integrate our analytics across all the curriculum,” says Dr. Henry Munneke, associate dean for the undergraduate program, speaking to Poets&Quants during a recent visit to Terry’s campus in Athens. “We’re going to make sure that people have accessibility to AI courses at all levels.”
A CURRICULUM BUILT FOR WHAT COMES NEXT
Anika Bhattacharya: “If you’re not able to make a meaningful connection in Terry, it’s because you literally haven’t left your dorm”
Munneke is just as focused on a second, harder goal – keeping critical thinking intact.
“When you think about higher education, it’s critical thinking,” he says. “If you’re not critically thinking, you have to understand how big of a crutch it can be.”
For Anika Bhattacharya, an Accounting and Economics major from Suwanee, Georgia set to graduate in May 2026, that balance between rigor and access was part of what drew her to Terry in the first place.
Accepted into a high school pipeline initiative called the Accelerated Business Program, Bhattacharya says it gave her an early window into Terry’s culture. “We had met so much of the Terry faculty and the USS office,” she says, recalling how staff shared “what Terry has to offer, what the curriculum is, how many resources there are.”
“The amount of things that this school has to offer was just incredible,” she adds.
AI EVERYWHERE – WITH RULES & REALISM
Henry Munneke: “When you think about higher education, it’s critical thinking. If you’re not critically thinking, you have to understand how big of a crutch it can be”
Terry’s AI strategy is not built around the idea that every student will become a developer. The goal is broader literacy and responsible use across majors, with faculty support structured to keep pace with a field that changes by the week.
“Whether you think AI is all hype or the next best thing – it’s not going anywhere,” says Dr. Marc Ragin, associate professor for risk management and insurance.
Ragin points to a pressure facing business education right now: employers already expect graduates to arrive more capable with AI than the generations managing them.
“I think we need to teach our students in responsible and ethical use of AI,” he says. “But I also think that employers expect them to be better than the oldest generation at using AI when they get to the workplace.”
To keep up, Terry has launched an AI task force with an aggressive timeline and multiple subcommittees focused on employer input, classroom integration, and faculty productivity.
“We’re trying to match pace with our industry partners,” Ragin says, describing focus groups with major employers who hire Terry students.
Rather than waiting for lengthy approvals to create entirely new classes, Terry leaders say they can move faster by updating existing courses – and by revamping assessment.
“It’s impacting every course,” Munneke says. “We have to integrate it into everything.”
That shift is already forcing rethink after rethink on how students are evaluated. Ragin, who is taking over the capstone course for risk management majors, is replacing a long-standing 50-page paper with simulated market interactions and live meetings designed to mirror how the industry actually works.
“I’m assessing them on what they’re saying to each other and the deliverables that they put together, maybe with the assistance of AI,” he says. “They better know what they’re talking about when they sit down at that table.”
THE AI CERTIFICATE – AND WHAT IT SIGNALS
Gerald “Jerry” Kane: “We’re not going to turn you into AI developers. “But we can give you the kind of working knowledge that makes you the AI person in the room”
One of Terry’s most visible moves is a newly launched undergraduate AI certificate – and the early numbers suggest it is hitting a nerve.
“It launched October 1st,” says Dr. Jerry Kane, department head for management information systems. “We had 212 students apply. We admitted 112.”
Half of the admitted students come from outside the MIS major, Kane says, including finance and marketing. It is a five-course program, with a target of reaching a steady state of about 200 students at any given time, and a long-term plan to incorporate courses from other departments such as AI in finance or AI in marketing.
Within MIS, Kane says, the department has integrated AI into all four core courses and pivoted its programming language from Java to Python.
In a required MIS course all Terry students take, Kane says the goal is to ensure sophomores get baseline training in AI literacy, prompt engineering, and ethical use.
For seniors graduating this year, the certificate has become a symbol of Terry’s pace. Daniela Villalobos, a Marketing major who graduates in 2026, calls it one of those things people outside Georgia may not realize Terry has already built.
“I’m so sad. I wish I could have done it because we’re graduating now,” she says. “It’s not going away. It’s just getting bigger. It’s here for the long term.”
Kane frames the aim in practical terms.
“We’re not going to turn you into AI developers,” he tells students. “But we can give you the kind of working knowledge that makes you the AI person in the room.”
THE INTERNATIONAL BUSINESS CO-MAJOR – GLOBALIZING EVERY DEGREE
Kari Sicard: “We found through reaching out to companies that they really are looking for globally minded employees”
If AI is reshaping how work gets done, Terry leaders say global fluency is increasingly defining where work gets done.
That thinking sits behind one of the college’s quieter structural innovations: an International Business co-major designed not as a second field of study, but as a way to internationalize a student’s primary discipline.
“So how that works is it’s not a double major that students can apply for,” explains Kari Sicard, international business programs specialist. “It is a co-major that actually changes their primary major to internationalize that.”
For example, a marketing student might replace traditional coursework with international marketing classes while completing required foreign language study. The program also mandates an international immersion experience.
The model is working. About 84% of co-major students complete a study abroad program, while roughly 15.6% pursue international internships.
Terry has dramatically expanded the financial support behind those experiences. Annual funding through the Passport Terry scholarship program has grown from roughly $50,000 to $320,000, helping nearly 200 students in the most recent cycle. Every student who demonstrated financial need received assistance.
“That’s a really great way for them to get that experience,” Sicard says.
The college is also widening its geographic footprint as employer expectations evolve. Programs now span Europe, South America, and Asia, with newer offerings in Vietnam and Uruguay and a recently added India program tied partly to the country’s growing role in technology and AI.
One pilot may be especially notable: an undergraduate consulting program in Uruguay that places students inside companies to solve real business problems – an experience more commonly associated with MBA education.
“Our students are going to be going to do consulting projects with Uruguay firms,” Sicard says, “to give them that consulting experience when typically undergrads don’t really get that very often.”
The push reflects what Terry is hearing from recruiters.
“We found through reaching out to companies that they really are looking for globally minded employees,” Sicard says.
Even graduates who remain in the U.S., she notes, are increasingly working inside multinational organizations.
“Many of them are international companies,” she says. “So even if they’re not going to be living abroad, they’re probably going to have co-workers that either go abroad or are from abroad.”
For Terry administrators building a future-facing undergraduate program, the implication is clear: technical literacy alone is no longer enough.
Students must be able to operate across borders, cultures, and time zones – a capability the co-major is designed to embed directly into the degree rather than treat as an optional add-on.
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