On April 1, the UW-Madison SBDC piloted a new hands-on workshop with 18 Badger Consulting Club students, exploring how AI tools can enhance small business consulting work. Students applied AI in real-time through case studies and learned how to critically evaluate AI-generated insights using lateral reading — an essential digital literacy skill in today’s digital landscape.
Since fall of 2017, the SBDC team has served as mentors for the Badger Consulting Club (BCC), where select students have the opportunity to work directly with SBDC clients on approximately 8 projects per year. Their consulting projects focus on real-world small business challenges, such as: SWOT analyses, industry research, consumer insights, and marketing analytics.
The accompanying activities helped students better understand when — or if — AI tools should be used in a given consulting context. This critical thinking component encouraged students to align their AI usage with the needs of the client, the nature of the project, and the ethical implications of their work. One skill students learned was lateral reading, a digital literacy skill that helps users assess the validity of information and identify when AI is conflating material from different sources (a common risk).
We hope to incorporate this training into BCC’s fall programming to help more students build their AI literacy.