Georgetown University  ·  McDonough School of Business

AI & Marketing

MARK6582  ·  1.5 Credits  ·  Elective  ·  Spring 2026  ·  Simon Blanchard

About This Course

What should MBAs actually know about AI in marketing? Is it the psychology of AI, how consumers perceive and trust automated systems? Or something more foundational: how AI systems are built, so that students can identify good use cases, spot bad ones, and understand why a system might fail?

This course takes the second approach. It is organized around a framework grounded in how these systems are actually engineered: what does the system perceive, how is that information represented, what model operates on it, under what constraints, and what behavior results? Not to make MBAs into engineers, but to give them a basis for evaluating AI in business settings without taking it on faith.

The goal is not to build AI systems. It is to develop the judgment to assess whether a proposed use case will actually work, and to diagnose why it might not. The cases, simulations, and group project are all oriented around the same question: not "what can AI do?" but "will this work here, and how would I know?"

View Syllabus

Lectures

Slides are posted approximately one week after each class session.

Week 1  ·  March 18
Day 1 — Introduction
What is AI? How do machines learn? Introduction to the course project.
Perception · Representation · Models · Constraints · Rule-Based vs Learning · Supervised, Unsupervised & Reinforcement Learning · LLMs
View Slides → Study Guide →
Week 2  ·  March 25
Day 2 — Chatbot-Enabled CRM & AI Advertising
Case: HubSpot & Motion AI (HBS #518-067)  ·  Lecture: AI & Advertising
Posted after class
Week 3  ·  April 1
Day 3 — AI Targeting & AI Visibility
Case + Dashboard: Artea (HBS #521-021)  ·  Guest: Director of Organic Search, SEMrush
Posted after class
Week 4  ·  April 8
Day 4 — AI Pricing & Promotions
Lecture: AI Pricing & Promotions  ·  In-class: SEMrush AI Visibility Exam
Posted after class
Week 5  ·  April 15
Day 5 — AI-Driven Pricing & Privacy
Case + Spreadsheet: PittaRosso (HBS #522-046)  ·  Lecture: Privacy & Ethics
Posted after class
Week 6  ·  April 22
Day 6 — Group Project Presentations
Team presentations  ·  Peer evaluations
Posted after class
Simon Blanchard is Dean's Professor and Professor of Marketing at Georgetown University's McDonough School of Business. He is Co-Editor at the Journal of Marketing Research and teaches courses in marketing research methods and consumer behavior. More at simonjblanchard.com.