Introduction to AI and Hugging Face -- for Business Analytics students
This wasn’t my first time giving a lecture at a university. But it was my first time doing it for a non-technical class. I was surprised to see higher levels of adoption of AI tools and workflows among them compared to some engineering classes I’ve talked to.
The students were engaged and curious as I walked them through the Hugging Face ecosystem. We first discussed what AI is and how we got to the current state of the field — how we went from rule-based systems over half a century ago to the modern, autonomous agents that they use.
I kept the talk at a beginner-friendly, high level of abstraction, especially when talking about the history of AI, to make sure that all the students remained engaged. One student asked me what it meant to “train” a model. So we took a short detour to explain the concept of model training to the level that an untrained person would understand it.
I believe it is important that non-technical people have an intuition of how the systems they use work, especially when the system in question — namely, generative AI — is almost indistinguishable from magic.
After the talk, we had a workshop meant to show the Hugging Face ecosystem in a real business analytics scenario. I planned to show them how they can use the HF plugin in Codex or Claude Code. We were out of luck because that day Codex shipped a small bug in their app that prevented users from accessing the “Codex” mode. I ended up going over the practical use case on the screen instead of having the students do it themselves. After the talk, I sent the students the video below so they can follow along at home once the Codex bug is fixed.
It was a pleasure meeting the students and I am happy to see that the coming generation of business graduates includes many driven, high-agency individuals who will have great impact in their communities.
Until next time.