Citizen Writes
Artificial Intelligence
AI for business and economic development
19/10/2026
Professor Xue Zhou is not only Professor in AI in Business Education in the University of Leicester School of Business, but also one of the UK’s first Deans of AI in higher education. In this interview, Professor Zhou discusses how AI affects business and economic development, but first we asked her what her role as Dean of AI involves.
“My role is to lead the strategic integration of AI across teaching, learning, research and operations within the School of Business,” she explains. “We’re using the ‘4P’ approach, which is people, pedagogy, platform and policy. And under that, we have developed five streams to support teaching, research and operations. The first is academic development, which focuses on staff training and development. Then we have curriculum development, looking at how to embed AI into the curriculum. We also have a policy and guidance stream because AI is evolving so fast and we need to make sure that we provide clear guidance for staff and students on how to use it ethically and responsibly.
“Another stream focuses on research and funding; that supports interdisciplinary collaboration, external funding opportunities and the dissemination of best practice through research and scholarship. The last one is AI literacy development, providing extracurricular activities for our students such as our AI micro-internship project. We also organise events, for example last year we held an ‘AI and robotics’ symposium, invited industry speakers to talk to the students directly about what the industry needs, the skills required, and how a student can develop those skills at university. So that’s the scope of my role as Dean of AI, overseeing all of these streams.”
Starting with the big questions, we asked Professor Zhou how AI is changing the ways that business and organisations operate, and which industries and sectors are being most affected by this.
“At its core, AI enables organisations to automate routine activities, augment human decision-making, and allow people to focus on higher-value work. For example, AI is being used for things like data analysis, where it can provide accurate answers because that’s numerical. But there are a lot of things that still need some kind of human agency co-working with AI, such as decision making, information analysis or marketing. However, having said that, AI is a buzzword and many organisations will claim that they’re ‘using AI’ when in reality they probably don’t really understand AI or don’t see the benefits to using AI. I would say many AI projects in organisations are failing because they don’t really use systems thinking. They just pursue it as a buzzword or think about AI like any other technology, without thinking about how the whole process needs to be changed.
“If you look at what’s happening across industries, you will see a lot of the big tech companies have been affected most. There have been a lot of redundancies because many coding tasks are repetitive and can be automated. Coding used to be a very popular subject and now AI is lowering some of the technical barriers to software development and enabling more people to create digital solutions. The other sector that’s also being affected, I think, is actually education. When I talk to my colleagues some of them are resistant to AI because they are worried that their job will be replaced. They can imagine a future when there’s a robot in the classroom with an AI brain. But education has already changed a lot, in a lot of areas; for example, HR can use AI to do CV screening or shortlisting. Some academic staff are using AI for lecture preparation, assessment design and administrative tasks. The real question is not whether AI will change the way we work but how we can use it to enhance what people do rather than simply automate it.”
One of the big worries about AI is trust, that it takes humans out of the equation and it can give wrong answers to things that nobody is checking. So we asked Professor Zhou how businesses can use AI in a way that generates trust rather than concern amongst both staff and customers.
“It has become a huge issue, but trust begins with transparency. And that’s the biggest problem right now, because the majority of AI companies don’t tell us how they do the training, how they deal with data. They get a lot of data from us, the customers, but how exactly they are using that data to train their AI models is not very clear. So that’s the reason people get scared. And also there’s no proper governance. I think it’s an organisation’s responsibility – and also the government’s responsibility – to have very clear governance that can build public trust. That would encourage companies to use AI and encourage customers to use AI. Also ownership and accountability; if anything goes wrong, who is taking that responsibility? At the end of the day, it will be a human who might go to prison, not AI. So we need to have very clear responsibilities and accountabilities about who is going to do the final checking and human verification of AI-generated outputs before they are published in the public domain or shared with customers.
“Right now, a lot of companies are using AI agents but any agent needs to have a proper knowledge base, because you can’t really predict what kind of questions your customer will put into a chatbot. So that’s the reason companies need to think more comprehensively, doing some kind of pilot before they reach out to the big customer base. You need to make sure that the right information and knowledge is being put in an agent before you make it autonomous, and also make sure that it is being checked properly. If anything goes wrong, you should have probably another AI to alert and escalate things to a human assistant who can provide a more dedicated or personalised support for the customer. So trust comes from several perspectives: transparency, ownership, accountability and also, very importantly, governance.”
Turning to higher education, what skills can or should students be acquiring that will set them up for jobs in an AI-dominated workplace?
“First, the subject knowledge remains essential because you can’t make any good judgement if you don’t have the core knowledge. Beyond that, it’s about helping students develop metacognitive skills they will need to thrive in an AI-enabled world. Perhaps the most important skills are critical thinking, problem solving, creativity and judgement. That’s become very, very important because, for example, anybody could use AI to generate a perfect marketing campaign within a few seconds, but what really differentiates people is their ability to think critically, apply context and bring original ideas to the table.
“This is obvious when we assess the students’ work. Two students might use the same AI tools, but the quality of the output can be very different. So you need to show that you have knowledge, but also that you really understand the subject and can demonstrate your judgement and your ability to create something that reflects your own thinking and perspective. Another capability is systems thinking. This is not a new idea, but it becomes popular because people need to stop thinking of AI as a tool but rather as a system. A company will recruit you not because you know about AI, but because you can identify business problems and decide whether AI is the right solution, and then which AI tools they should choose, and manage risks and governance, and support others in using AI effectively. That’s why systems thinking is becoming such an important skill.
“The other skills we need to consider are the skills that you come to university for; what makes a university different from a training centre is we give you this community that enables you to develop your leadership, communications and presentation skills. Those are very important because even if AI generates a perfect presentation for you, you have to make sure that you understand all the content and communicate it effectively and engage your audience.
“Finally, we recognise that universities can’t teach students everything they will need throughout their careers. That’s why resilience, adaptability and lifelong learning are so important. Technology is evolving rapidly, and the graduates who will succeed are those who can continuously learn, adapt and embrace new opportunities as they emerge.”
AI as a concept is still sufficiently new, and developing so fast, that there’s a whole range of responses to it amongst both individuals and companies, from those who want nothing to do with it, to those who leap on it and think it’s a solution to everything. We asked Professor Zhou whether people are underestimating or overestimating the impact, particularly the economic impact, that AI is going to have in the near to medium future?
“I think there are two separate groups,” she agrees. “One group will say AI is going to make human beings extinct in the next decade, because AI will replace almost everything we do and eventually become far more capable than humans. Well, I think that’s too extreme! At the end of the day, it’s a system created by people so the underlying principle is to serve the people. But it’s a dangerous game. We’re like outsiders. We know a little bit about AI, but we don’t necessarily know the core technical skills around AI. So that’s why we need collaborations between, let’s say, academics and organisations working together to create these proper regulations, this governance and to set up certain boundaries for AI: what AI can and can’t do. Also how AI can serve people in areas and ways that need to be researched and guided and regulated. That’s going to happen.
“On the other side are people thinking AI is completely useless, who are trying to avoid any kind of AI usage. I know some people are extremely suspicious of all this. They don’t use any AI and they don’t share any of their data. They will always reject cookies because they don’t want their data to be shared and trained by a company. Unfortunately, even if you think you don’t use AI at all, when you turn on your laptop, your desktop, your phone, you’re already using AI. It’s already part of your life, even if you didn’t realise it. When you search on Google and the next day they recommend some of the things you searched for yesterday, there’s an AI algorithm behind that. So it’s already in your life.
“I think that people need to see the positivity of AI. AI could bring economic benefits as well as social benefits. People need to adopt AI, adapt to AI and remember that their jobs themselves will change, the job roles and responsibilities will be changed. We can’t neglect AI. The only thing we can do is make sure that AI serves people for a good reason, in a good way.”
Finally we asked Professor Zhou, as we are asking all our AI experts: if you could give one message to a student considering studying at Leicester because of its leadership in AI, what would it be?
“In the era of AI, you have to run faster, run with AI. The reason why the University of Leicester purchased Microsoft Copilot is because we see the students’ needs and also what employers want. So we want to make sure our students have equal access to those AI tools. The key message for students is not just to learn about AI, but to think about it. AI is not just a tool. In the School of Business we define AI literacy in terms of four dimensions, which are: know and understand AI; use and apply AI; evaluate and create with AI; and AI ethics. These four dimensions have been built into our core curriculum. So when you graduate from the University of Leicester, you will be equipped with these four dimensions of AI literacy. You will know how to use AI but also you will have developed the AI literacy that will help you shape the future.”