Welcome to the February Edition of the Business School Newsletter
Birmingham City Business School
Start your career the minute you walk through our door at Birmingham City Business School.
In this month’s newsletter, we will be looking at Artificial Intelligence; what companies succeeding with AI are doing differently, what are some of the biggest questions being asked about AI in 2025, how AI is changing businesses, and why consumers don’t want AI to seem human!
Sign up and join us for our upcoming Business Breakfast Networking Event, the third in its series consisting of excellent opportunities to network and learn about AI
Join the HLSM Graduate Recruitment Networking event to learn how to reduce costs, network and stand out again your competitors.
Sign up for the short course we offer on Value Proposition,
Join STEAMhouse for the Wonderful Wednesday Members Showcase which is a regular event designed to spotlight the incredible businesses within the STEAMhouse community.
Upcoming Events
Accessible AI for SMEs and its Practical applications
Join us on Wednesday 12th March 2025 for an exclusive networking event designed for SMEs eager to explore the transformative power of AI. Connect with like-minded professionals, learn about AI’s practical applications, and discover how it can drive innovation in your business.
What to Expect:
? AI Essentials for SMEs – A clear introduction to AI, breaking down key concepts in a practical and accessible way.
? Hands-on AI Applications – Learn how to use free, user-friendly AI tools to solve common SME challenges.
? Live Demonstrations – Work with real SME datasets to gain direct experience with AI’s potential.
? Strategic Insights – Discover how Birmingham City Business School’s College of Accounting, Finance, and Economics (AFE) can support your AI-driven growth.
Meet Our Speaker: Dr. Kifayat Khan
Dr. Kifayat Khan is working as Senior Lecturer of AI and Business Analytics at Birmingham City Business School. He serves as Program Director for the prestigious Business Finance course as well as leader for modules related to Fintech.
Kifayat has led significant research projects and secured fundings for initiatives ranging HR, cyber security, social network analysis, HealthTech, designing scalable data engineering algorithms among others. He has published 65 international publications and 3 patents so far and is recognized as a thought leader in graph-based analytics, AI-driven solutions, and FinTech.
Simplifying Graduate Recruitment
Find out how Higher Level Skills Match Plus, a new fully funded graduate recruitment service, could reduce costs and save you time.
One business told us they could say ￡7,000 per graduate hire when using our free service instead of using a traditional recruitment agency!
Higher Level Skills Match Plus is the new service brought to you by a partnership between the four major Universities in Birmingham: Birmingham City University, University of Birmingham, Aston University and University College Birmingham. It connects Enterprise Zone businesses with a talent pool of over 38,000 graduates and final year students living in Birmingham and Solihull, managing the entire recruitment process end-to-end. Following recruitment, the advisers provide 12 months of ongoing wraparound support to your graduate hire, and your business, to ensure the best chance of retention and progression in their role.
This new service will also help reduce the level of graduate unemployment in Birmingham and Solihull by connecting them with graduate level job vacancies in the Birmingham Enterprise Zone.
Join our Business Account Managers on Thursday 6th March 2025 for networking and refreshments to find out everything you need to know about how to make the most of the fully funded service.
Wonderful Wednesday Members Showcase
Join us for an evening of networking and connection. This event is your chance to learn more about the amazing businesses within our network
Enjoy complimentary food and drinks while mingling with fellow members in a relaxed and friendly atmosphere at our Wonderful Wednesday Members Showcase - a regular event designed to spotlight the incredible businesses within the STEAMhouse community.
Whether you're here to support, learn, or just connect, whether you're a STEAMhouse member, a local entrepreneur, academic, or someone simply curious about innovative businesses, the Members showcase is a great chance to strengthen the connection and uncover new opportunities within our community.
Each session will feature two businesses presenting their venture using our new 9m screen within the Digital Labs.
Presentations will last no longer than fifteen minutes, with the option of questions towards the end.
领英推荐
Uncover Your Company's Unique 'Value Proposition' ?
We've previously told you about the popular?Value Propositions?Short Course offered by Birmingham City University, and this is to let you know that the next run of the course begins on 13th March 2025.
This is an opportunity to steal a march on your competitors with some of the best training available. ? ‘Value Propositions’ is an outstanding course designed for company owners, entrepreneurs and business marketers. It enables you to take a fresh look at what your organisation uniquely offers in its market space and then zero in on this aspect as a key component of new business activity and competitor differentiation.
The course represents a fantastic opportunity for return on investment, costing just ￡150 (inc vat)?for five 3-hour sessions. The acquisition of just one new customer using principles learned on the course could justify the enrolment fee many times over. If you are responsible for generating sales leads for a business or organisation of any size, you really shouldn’t miss this one.
Artificial Intelligence
What Companies Succeeding with AI Do Differently
In 2021, researchers at MIT and McKinsey teamed up to ask more than 100 companies how they were using AI in their operations and to learn what separated the highest-performing companies from the rest. They conducted a similar survey in 2023 to see what had changed. They found that the gap between leading companies and the rest had widened; that the payback-period for AI investments was much shorter; and that leading companies were better at identifying and implementing use cases that delivered positive outcomes with lower risk. They also identified four factors that set leading companies apart, to find out what these factors are, click the link below.
Four Big Questions About AI In 2025
There’s been quite a lot of discourse in and around MIT about the state of technology right now.
Breaking news includes this concern about DeepSeek’s new model and how it affects the U.S. tech industry. There’s also quite a lot of talk about AI models themselves, and how they integrate into our lives. Most of us expect 2025 to be a banner year for artificial intelligence technology.
There are four aspects of AI that many of our educators and presenters are talking about at MIT events and elsewhere, to find out what they are click the link below.
What is living intelligence, the new frontier in AI?
Business leaders must prepare themselves for the next wave in tech that will take AI to another level. Artificial intelligence has been at the centre of the tech world, but it's not the only technology businesses need to prepare for. In the future, AI will combine with other advancing technologies to create a new wave of personalized AI capable of anticipating users' actions and evolving independently, said Amy Webb, a futurist and professor at the NYU Stern School of Business, at the Harvard Business Review. This phenomenon, called living intelligence, could be the next big thing.
3 Ways AI Is Changing How Companies Work
Built on the foundation of IT and digitization, the AI revolution is transcending limitations in at least three highly consequential areas for business: 1) enabling continuous enterprise reinvention instead of periodic transformation, 2) using real-time intelligence instead of depending on episodically-updated software, and 3) synthesizing multiple modes of data instead of being restricted to a single type of input like text only or visual only. Today, leading companies are leveraging these game-changing attributes of AI into strategies that separate them from their competitors and, along the way, redefine how humans and machines work together.
Research: Consumers Don’t Want AI to Seem Human
Making your AI tools look human or dehumanizing them altogether are not the best ways to win over your users. Instead, show them the human effort and expertise that go into their development and design. The path forward is highlighting the humans in AI rather than humanizing AI. The good news: the reality for today’s AI systems is that they are fundamentally products of human work. From architectural decisions about model design to the curation of training data; reinforcement learning feedback to fine-tuning response behaviours; and prompt engineering to application development — humans shape these systems at every level.