By Holt Hackney
Patrick Johanns was preparing a reading list for his students in Fundamentals of Business Analytics, one that would address the use and ethics of artificial intelligence in business.
But he found nothing useful, as nothing had been published in any textbooks. He realized the technology is moving so fast, it’s leaving discussions about ethics and responsible use in the dust and he had nothing to use.
So he wrote the book himself.
“AI in Business: Creating Value Responsibly,” by Johanns and James Chaffee, both associate professors of business analytics, and Jackie Rees Ulmer, dean of the college of business at Ohio University, will be published in January 2026 by McGraw-Hill Publishers. It will be one of the first business texts to address ethics and responsible use of artificial intelligence in business.
Johanns said the authors didn’t approach the topic with the assumption that AI is bad or inherently dangerous. They see it as something that can be incredibly helpful in building strong, healthy businesses and more productive employees.
“It’s more than just a tool, it can be a trusted collaborator if used properly,” he said.
The book is designed for non-technical students who expect to be using AI in their jobs but won’t be doing the coding. It reviews AI’s history, the different types of AI, the basics of how it works, and the ways that businesses have used early iterations.
The book also highlights how businesses are using AI for the good. For instance, a nonprofit in Hong Kong that uses AI to sort used clothing based on its condition, or an agricultural sprayer equipped with an AI-enabled camera that determines whether something is a weed or a plant, reducing the use of herbicides.
It has more than 100 other examples, drawn from companies large and small, across industries and geographies, and spanning both successes and failures. He said they were guided by the core insight from their years of teaching that when students see the relevance of a topic to their own lives and futures, they engage more deeply. Weaved throughout all of it are lessons intended to spark discussion of how it can be used ethically.
“We didn’t want to treat ethics as an afterthought,” Johanns said. “Rather than put it in a separate chapter that students can bypass, we incorporate ethics throughout so it has to be considered, prompting students to think critically about the societal impact of AI as they encounter each new concept.”
Ethical conundrums that Johanns and Chaffee explore include worker displacement and how organizations choose to implement AI to minimize or maximize lost employees; the AI divide, in which wealthier people and more economically developed nations have greater access to AI, leaving impoverished countries even further behind; and sustainability issues, as the servers that run AI platforms require enormous amounts of power to operate and water to keep them cool.
Johanns said the growing use of ChatGPT is a good example of ethical knots the technology can tie. While the platform can be a great time saver and help people more easily understand difficult concepts, its priority is to provide an answer. Accuracy is secondary, so it often gives wrong or misleading answers that sound authentic.
“Part of using ChatGPT is understanding that it makes stuff up and it’s your responsibility to check to make sure that what it’s telling you is accurate,” he said. “When you get in the weeds you see so many ethical issues that we include in the book.”
The book is not available in print and will be online only, so he said it’s more of a resource than a traditional textbook. Johanns said the format will make the book more accessible to students. It will also be more relevant, as he and his co-authors can update it in a matter of weeks or even days to reflect the latest developments in the rapidly changing field of AI.