Applied AI in higher education
Two business informatics students at THU are automating selected processes at the Digitalisation Centre as part of a practical project – using AI, n8n and Scrum.
Alexander Nikolaus supports small and medium-sized enterprises on their journey towards a digital future. As head of the Ulm | Alb-Donau | Biberach | Neu-Ulm Digitalisation Centre, he deals with new technologies and their practical application on a daily basis. AI, automation and digital processes are not only topics covered in his consultancy work with businesses, but are also continuously tested and further developed in his own day-to-day work.
With the introduction of a CRM system, the Digitalisation Centre laid the foundations for numerous automation opportunities and identified relevant use cases. Two of these use cases concerned the collection and analysis of customer feedback, as well as the analysis of social media metrics. This is where Elias Thurn and Robert Schoger, two Business Informatics students at Ulm University of Applied Sciences (THU), came in. As part of the ‘team project’ for their degree programme, they developed two end-to-end workflows on the n8n automation platform: One automatically sends out feedback forms and transfers the results directly to the reporting dashboard; the other collects social media metrics from various platforms and automatically enters them into the CRM system. An AI interface handles the intelligent processing of the data. The work was carried out using the agile Scrum methodology, in four sprints – by the end, both use cases were tested and ready for deployment.
The project demonstrates what business informatics is all about today: the interplay of software development, data management, artificial intelligence and business processes, put to the test in a real-world scenario. “Our students are already using AI and automation in an application-oriented way whilst still studying, long before they embark on their work placement semester,” says Prof. Dr Reinhold von Schwerin, who supervised the project.
The project also served as a valuable practical test for the Digitalisation Centre. Valuable insights into the future use of AI and automation were gained from the project.
