Decision-Making With Agentic AI
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Lauren Maghsoudi
Assistant Director, Open Enrollment Programs
Zoran Perunovic, Ph.D.
Senior Director, Executive Education
From Business Intelligence to Artificial Intelligence: Making Data-Driven Decisions with AI
Upcoming Dates and Tuition:
Monday, May 4, 2026
Wednesday, May 6, 2026
Monday, May 11, 2026
Wednesday, May 13, 2026
Monday, May 18, 2026
Wednesday, May 20, 2026
Wednesday, May 27, 2026
Monday, June 1, 2026
Time: 11:30 am to 1:00 pm\ Tuition: $1,950 + cost of purchasing a monthly Claude Max subscription account
Overview
AI agents that understand plain English, query your data, and deliver answers instantly are transforming how organizations make decisions. In this Rice Business Executive Education live online four-week program, you’ll learn why and how to implement agentic AI in your organization through hands-on work with real datasets and live AI tools — so you can clearly understand and apply the concepts.
You’ll gain practical skills you can use immediately, such as analyzing data and generating reports, connecting to and using databases, and building document-based AI systems — all with no prior coding experience required.
Interested in Executive Education?
Program Highlights
- Entirely hands-on sessions with exercises with real datasets
- Covers the full stack from ad-hoc analysis to production-ready AI systems
- Includes database skills, API calls, web apps, reporting pipelines and document AI
- Flexible synchronous online structure: enables participation from anywhere
Who Should Attend
- Executives and managers responsible for data-driven decisions
- Finance, operations and strategy professionals
- Business analysts and business intelligence (BI) teams exploring AI transformation
- IT leaders evaluating AI agent deployment
Expected Outcomes
After the program, you will be able to:
- Analyze data and produce reports using AI agents, even with no prior coding experience.
- Connect AI to corporate databases so that anyone can query them in plain English.
- Build automated reporting pipelines from database to finished slide deck.
- Deploy document-based AI that answers questions from company policies and contracts with citations.
- Evaluate reliability, compliance and governance requirements for enterprise AI.
Program Schedule
Session A
Session B
Week 1
From Dashboards to AI Agents
- Understand why AI agents are displacing traditional BI
- Learn the agent loop: plan, execute, observe, iterate
- Distinguish chatbots, code-execution agents and terminal agents
Exploring Data With AI
- Go from a raw spreadsheet to a written recommendation with charts in minutes
- Ask decision-relevant questions in plain English
- Work across multiple files and file formats
Week 2
AI as Thinking Partner
- Use AI as a sparring partner for decisions
- Challenge assumptions, run pre-mortems, stress-test analysis
- Blend data analysis with structured thinking moves
Connecting Databases
- Connect AI to SQL databases using skills and MCP
- Build a reusable database skill from a schema description
- Build a demo web app for natural-language database queries
Week 3
Reporting Pipelines
- Chain queries, charts, narratives and document assembly into automated pipelines
- Build a reporting app that produces slide decks from a single instruction
- Understand sandboxed execution for production deployment
Reliability and Compliance
- Validate AI outputs with a repeatable verification protocol
- Red-team database skills and RAG systems
- Navigate data sovereignty, cloud inference and audit requirements
Week 4
Beyond BI: Agent Workflows
- Orchestrate agents for personal productivity
- Build document processing and variance analysis workflows
- Apply safety principles to multi-system agents
Retrieval-Augmented Generation
- Give AI knowledge of your company's documents
- Get answers grounded in your policies and contracts — with citations
- Build and test a RAG system for document-based Q&A
Meet Your Professor
Kerry Back
J. Howard Creekmore Professor of Finance and Professor of Economics\ Finance Area Coordinator\
Department Faculty
Office
McNair Hall 325
Contact 713-348-4168 Email
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Have a Question?
Lauren Maghsoudi
Assistant Director, Open Enrollment Programs
Zoran Perunovic, Ph.D.
Senior Director, Executive Education