About This Guide
Background on the project, the author, and how to use these resources.
Author
John Garcia
Assistant Professor of Finance & Analytics
California Lutheran University, School of Management
jgarcia@callutheran.edu
LinkedIn
Personal Website
About This Project
This guide synthesizes the top 10 AI applications for finance classroom instruction, ranked by three weighted criteria: instructional impact on finance-specific learning outcomes (40%), feasibility for typical U.S. finance faculty (35%), and strength of supporting evidence (25%).
Each ranked entry provides complete implementation details, including student and instructor workflows, sample prompts ready for immediate use, assessment rubrics, skills inventories, and concrete first-week pilot instructions. The goal is to give faculty operational guidance they can act on immediately, not just conceptual overviews.
The guide was developed through a systematic review of AI-in-education research published through early 2026, with a focus on applications validated in business and finance contexts. The ranking reflects the author's assessment of evidence strength, feasibility for resource-constrained faculty, and direct applicability to finance-specific learning outcomes — including TVM, WACC, DCF modeling, risk analysis, and professional communication.
This website serves as a companion resource to the handout and presentation delivered at the Southwestern Finance Association Annual Meeting in March 2026.
Conference Context
This guide was prepared for the Southwestern Finance Association (SWFA) Annual Meeting, March 2026. The SWFA is a leading regional finance academic association fostering research and teaching excellence in finance.
The SWFA audience encompasses faculty from regional universities and liberal arts institutions across the southwestern United States — the guide is designed to be immediately implementable without institutional AI infrastructure, API budgets, or large research computing resources. All 10 applications can be piloted with free tools in the first week of a course.
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License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License (CC BY-NC-SA 4.0).
You are free to share and adapt this material for non-commercial purposes, provided you give appropriate attribution and distribute any adaptations under the same license.
Contact
For questions, feedback, or collaboration inquiries, email jgarcia@callutheran.edu or reach out through the GitHub repository.