AI-driven Business at Rennes School of Business focuses on understanding both the advantages of AI applied to business, as well as how firms can transform to implement these new techniques. In this area technical AI and digital expertise is blended with work practices expertise to find solutions that work, and to help businesses to be prepared for this revolution. Researchers within the area publish research on those efforts in leading journals in all business disciplines. We also train students and executives to be able to take advantage of these opportunities. This research centre includes three interrelated themes: (i) AI Strategy for Competitive Advantage, (ii) AI for Operations, Optimization & Automation, and (iii) Human & Ethical AI.
Area of Expertise
Artificial intelligence (AI) adoption strategy, AI in operations, and ethical aspects of AI.
Date of creation
May 2018
Research Center Director
André Nemeh is an Associate Professor in Strategy and Innovation, and the Director of the “AI for Business” Research Center. His research focuses on coopetition strategy, the adoption of artificial intelligence (AI)/big data, and project management. Additionally, he is the co-founder of the Regional Observatory of Artificial Intelligence and Data Science.
Center’s ambition
The center’s ambition is to study the impact of AI on businesses across several sub-domains. Firstly, as a strategic resource, AI enhances decision-making and strategic performance in companies, redefining competitive advantage across all sectors, including traditional industries. Secondly, AI and big data analytics provide solutions to challenges in operations and project management by supporting decision-making in uncertain and complex environments. Finally, AI raises ethical and social questions, such as the impact on workers and societal equity, while offering productivity gains and reducing human errors. Researchers at the center explore these dimensions to develop relevant theories and empirical solutions.
Associated or derived courses at Rennes SB
Academic partnerships
Dublin City University-Irish Institute of Digital Business (Ireland), Democritus University of Thrace (Greece).
Partnerships with businesses and institutions
B<>com, UNCTAD, Bretagne Développement et Innovation (BDI).
3 key figures
Distinctive feature
Our territorial anchoring is notably manifested through the study of AI adoption by Britanny companies and the support of AI start-ups in Brittany in the face of an industry dominated by large global companies.
AI-driven business is about businesses intelligently knowing their customers on an individual basis. It is about old hefty cost structures being swept away overnight. It is about product and services that are optimally designed to fly off the shelves. It is about HR knowing the best employees to hire and marketers knowing the proven winning ads to write. It is about firm financing and supply chains determined at the lowest cost and the highest benefit. It is about strategy that builds on intelligence that sees beyond human capabilities.
Firms operating with the best AI-driven advantages will inevitably triumph in their industry. The nature of AI technologies tends to lead to single or few winners in any given industry. That creates obvious existential issues for the firms that fall behind. Witness the upheaval in financial market trading, where start-up hedge fund AI-driven algorithms have, in just a decade, wiped out the trading desks of large investment firms that stood for a century as reliable major profit centres. We are increasingly see this spread across every industry.
(Head: Dr André Nemeh)
This sub-area studies how AI impacts businesses and their strategies and policies. AI is considered as a special resource offering magnified data processing capabilities that advance the acquisition, understanding, and processing of knowledge, as well as resource allocations in companies. This helps shape the decision making and consequent performance of strategic actions. The rise of AI may fundamentally change how firms obtain and sustain their competitive advantages, not just for high-technology industries, but also for more traditional businesses. Researchers of this sub-area develop new theories supported by empirical evidence to explore this novel opportunity.
(Head: Dr Oncü Hazir)
This sub-area involves investigating how AI and big data analytics can offer new opportunities to deal with challenges in operations and project management. A key challenge in the new era of AI, which researchers of this sub-area focus on, is the need to make rapid decisions which cope with the uncertainty and inherent complexity of a dynamic business environment. Computational intelligence approaches of AI and big data analytics tools help address this challenge by supporting decision making under uncertainty.
(Head: Dr Laura Noval)
This sub-area recognises that the development and exploitation of AI technologies in business raises anxiety and excitement surrounding its future implications for businesses, individual workers and societal fairness. For businesses, the developments in AI will clearly offer gains in productivity and reduction of human error by replacing certain non-routine and cognitive tasks currently requiring human intelligence. However, this development poses multiple social and environmental concerns relevant to business managers and policy makers. Researchers working for this sub-area investigate questions pertinent to these issues and business solutions to such problems.
The professors and PhD students in this research center are actively working around the three research clusters, with 19 publications in top-level international academic journals such as the International Journal of Production Economics, European Journal of Operational Research, Human Resource Management Journal, Technological Forecasting and Social Change and Tourism Management among others. They are also engaged in dissemination of their research through teaching on the AI summer school, the MSc in Big Data Analytics, the MSc in Strategic and Digital Marketing and on the PhD programme at Rennes SB.
The professors and PhD students in this research center are actively working around the three research clusters, with 19 publications in top-level international academic journals such as the International Journal of Production Economics, European Journal of Operational Research, Human Resource Management Journal, Technological Forecasting and Social Change and Tourism Management among others.
The AI-driven Business area of excellence has different types of collaborations:
Information on our current key research collaborations are detailed below. We are always interested in new research collaboration opportunities. Please contact either the AI Business Director, Andre Nemeh, or any Principal Investigator to discuss the possibility of working together.
AI in Research Global Survey in collaboration with UNCTAD: We gathered opinions among researchers on how the scientific community perceives the role of artificial intelligence in research.
B<>com
We partner with B-Com, the leading digital technology innovation hub in Brittany, on number of research projects on envisaging the long-term impact of AI.
We are a research partner institute with the Irish Institute of Digital Business (dotLAB), one of the largest digital business research groups in Europe. In this partnership we, as dotLAB France, specialise in textual analysis for AI business as part of a global network of research institutes
Zayed University (~100K€)
A funded research project on the application of Latent Dirichlet Allocation topic modelling to predict agricultural commodity pricing (In collaboration with Agribusiness center).
Britanny Innovation and Development agency
Regional Observatory for AI and Data Science for a project to examine: The state of AI adoption by the key sectors in Brittany and the future development of AI; Needs, main obstacles, and constraints in adopting AI; Sectoral disparities/ developments among firms: measuring the impact of AI on firms’ functions; The links between AI users and solution providers. https://tools.bdi.fr/Etudes/IA/accueil.htm
INSOFE
We collaborate with INSOFE on a number of pedagogic and research projects. INSOFE is one of the largest data science training institutes in India well-known for the excellence of their education. Our projects centre on developing case studies of AI application in business, and research into effective AI business education.
CCI Paris (~20K€)
A funded project with the CCI Paris, Paris School of Business and Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, to apply machine learning and deep learning to understand growth patterns of small-to-medium-sized enterprises.
Other Project funding
The AI-driven Business Research Center has received funding for various research projects:
– Banque de France : Fraud detection by using AI
– Région Bretagne (cryptomonnaie, the Economic and Financial Perspectives on Non-Fungible Tokens (NFTs) and Blockchain-Based Investment Strategies conference (May 2022).
2023
2022
The AI Business Summer School is a four-week (from 15th May to 9th June) summer school programme providing the students with advanced knowledge in a wide range of aspects of data science applied to business. This includes developing knowledge of Python programming from scratch, network analysis, data visualisation, textual analysis, and application of machine learning and deep learning.
Four courses are available:
The completion of all four courses leads to a Certificate in AI Business and each course is equivalent to 3 ECTS (1.5 US credits).
The AI Business Summer School offers a wide range of benefits:
Dr André Nemeh Research Center Director |