{"id":23742,"date":"2026-10-27T13:39:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-27T13:39:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/?p=23742"},"modified":"2026-10-27T13:39:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-27T13:39:12","slug":"from-ai-user-to-ai-builder-kent-business-schools-ai-accelerator-gets-underway","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/2026\/10\/from-ai-user-to-ai-builder-kent-business-schools-ai-accelerator-gets-underway\/","title":{"rendered":"From AI User to AI Builder: Kent Business School&#8217;s AI Accelerator gets underway"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>The 2026\/27 AI for Business Accelerator at <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/kent-business-school\">Kent Business School<\/a> is officially underway, with students from Business, Finance and Computer Science having come together for the first hands-on AI Lab over the weekend.<\/p>\n<p>The opening session, From AI User to AI Builder, challenged students to move beyond simply using AI tools to designing and building practical solutions. Exploring everything from prompt and context engineering to agentic AI and the wider economic and social implications of artificial intelligence, students quickly got to work putting their learning into practice. <\/p>\n<p>Working in teams, students tackled three challenges, building an interactive AI Skills Radar to identify future skills gaps, a Jagged Frontier game exploring where humans and AI have the advantage, and an agentic Problem Scout designed to identify commercially relevant problems worth solving. <\/p>\n<p>The enthusiasm and ambition of the students impressed the programme&#8217;s leadership, particularly their recognition of how important practical AI skills will be for their future careers. <\/p>\n<p>Thomas Hirshmann said: &#8220;The students have an acute sense of the career relevance of AI skills and are eager to immerse themselves in developing those skills. I&#8217;m delighted with the start of this new cohort and can&#8217;t wait to unveil our corporate partners&#8217; challenges.&#8221; <\/p>\n<p>The next AI Lab, Data to Insight to Product, will build on these foundations, helping students turn data and ideas into practical applications. Further sessions will prepare them for the next phase of the Accelerator, when they&#8217;ll work in multidisciplinary teams on live business challenges set by corporate partners <a href=\"https:\/\/www.bmw.co.uk\/en\/index.html\">BMW<\/a>, <a href=\"https:\/\/schengen.europ-assistance.com\/en\">Europ Assistance<\/a> and the <a href=\"https:\/\/shortstraits.com\/\">Short Straits Maritime Cluster<\/a>. <\/p>\n<p>The <a href=\"https:\/\/www.kent.ac.uk\/kent-business-school\/ai-accelerator-for-business\">AI For Business Accelerator<\/a> offers students an opportunity to develop the technical, creative, collaborative and problem-solving skills increasingly valued by employers, while gaining first-hand experience of how AI can be applied to real business opportunities. <\/p>\n<p>It\u2019s not too late to register interest in joining the free programme open to all undergraduate and postgraduate students at Kent Business School and the School of Computing. Email <a href=\"mailto:ASPIRE@kent.ac.uk\">ASPIRE@kent.ac.uk<\/a> for more information. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>The 2026\/27 AI for Business Accelerator at Kent Business School is officially underway, with students from Business, Finance and Computer Science having come together for &hellip; <a href=\"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/2026\/10\/from-ai-user-to-ai-builder-kent-business-schools-ai-accelerator-gets-underway\/\">Read&nbsp;more<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":54944,"featured_media":23744,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[9890,19112],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23742","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-business","category-news-student"],"sub_title":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23742","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/54944"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=23742"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23742\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":23745,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/23742\/revisions\/23745"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/23744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=23742"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=23742"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.kent.ac.uk\/kbs-news-events\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=23742"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}