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AI is no longer a technology question. It's a business question. The organizations pulling ahead aren't necessarily those with the biggest IT budgets – they're the ones where managers know how to identify the right AI opportunities, build the business case, and drive implementation that delivers measurable results.
The AI Business Impact Certificate is an intensive, three-day English-language program designed for professionals and managers who want to do exactly that. No coding. No data science. Just clear frameworks, real-world cases, and hands-on tools that translate AI into business value you can quantify and present to any stakeholder.
By the end of the program, you'll know where AI creates value in your business, how to prioritize it, and how to make it happen.

One on-campus module
3 days

July 1-3, 2026
Online Kick-Off: June 18, 2026, 3-4 PM CEST

On site, Mannheim, Germany

English

Regular: €3,240
Early-bird price: €2,950 (until May 4, 2026)
20% discount for MBS and Mannheim University alumni and participants

At least 3 years of work experience, good English language skills

Certificate awarded by Mannheim Business School

Germany’s #1 Business School in Business Analytics (QS 2024/2025)
Gain insights from Prof. Dr. Florian Stahl, Academic Director of all Management Analytics and AI programs at Mannheim Business School, as he highlights why understanding AI is crucial in today’s fast-paced business world and why an on-site, hands-on training is more impactful than online courses.
Discover more about Prof. Dr. Florian Stahl below and hear directly from him how to leverage AI to drive business value, growth, and innovation during the AI Business Business Impact course.
Get a real feel for our training approach at Mannheim Business School!
The Mannheim Masterclass Series brings fresh input to the table: compact, practical, and thought-provoking. In just one hour, leading academics and practitioners unpack some of the most relevant business topics of today, offering new perspectives, frameworks, and impulses you can take straight into your work.
Participation is free of charge. Sessions take place online. Explore all sessions here.
AI Literacy That Goes Beyond the Hype: Cut through the noise. Develop a clear, confident understanding of how AI – from Generative AI to Agentic systems – actually works in a business context and where it creates real competitive advantage.
Frameworks You Can Use on Monday Morning: Every tool, model, and framework is designed for immediate application in your organization.
The Ability to Build a Real AI Business Case: Learn how to identify, evaluate, and prioritize AI use cases based on business value and feasibility and how to present them convincingly to leadership and the board.
Hands-On Experience with Modern AI Tools: Get practical in the AI Lab: work directly with LLMs, explore prompt engineering techniques, and simulate multi-agent AI interactions – no technical background needed.
Responsible AI From Day One: Understand how to integrate ethics, governance, and regulatory compliance into your AI strategy – not as an afterthought, but as a competitive asset.
Built for Professionals Who Need to Act on AI – Not Just Understand It.
You don't need to be a data scientist or software engineer to make AI work for your business. What you need is the strategic clarity to identify where AI creates value, the frameworks to build a case for it, and the confidence to drive it forward in your organization. This program is designed for exactly that.
You'll get the most out of this program if you are a:
Manager, team lead, or functional leader in marketing, operations, finance, HR, or sales who wants to move from AI observer to AI driver. Strategy, business development, or consulting professional looking to identify AI opportunities, build business cases, and present them to leadership. Entrepreneur or ambitious professional who recognizes AI literacy as a baseline expectation – and wants to get ahead of it.
Are you a senior leader or C-Level executive?
The AI Business Impact Certificate gives you a powerful strategic foundation. If you're a senior leader looking to go further – with more methodological depth, a focus on Analytics alongside AI, and a 5-day format designed specifically for C-Level and senior management – our Executive Program: Management Analytics & AI in Practice Certificate is your next step.
This program is taught in German and is built for leaders who want to own AI Strategy, scale it, and anchor it across their organization – with the analytical rigor to back every decision.
How This Program Works: Learning by doing – from hour one. Each day combines a concise conceptual input with immediate application: business cases, AI lab simulations, peer workshops, and strategy exercises that produce real outputs you take home.
No passive lectures. You think, apply, challenge, and build – alongside professionals from diverse industries facing the same questions you are.
Understand the key AI technologies shaping business today and how they differ in application and strategic relevance.
Apply industry-proven tools to assess where your organization stands and where to go next.
Navigate the governance, ethics, and compliance dimensions of AI deployment. Understand how responsible AI is not a constraint – but a competitive differentiator.
Get hands-on with modern AI systems. Learn how Large Language Models behave, how to prompt them effectively for business tasks, and how to simulate multi-agent AI interactions for real business scenarios.
Explore what hybrid teams look like in practice – and how to design workflows where AI amplifies human decision-making rather than replacing it.
Learn structured methods to identify high-impact AI opportunities in your business – including disruptive use cases you may not have considered yet – and evaluate them based on feasibility and strategic fit.
Define the right KPIs and metrics to forecast AI success. Learn how to translate AI potential into financial projections and measurable business outcomes.
Not every AI idea is worth pursuing first. Learn how to rank and sequence AI initiatives based on ROI potential, strategic alignment, and implementation risk.
Develop a structured, board-ready AI business case – and master how to present it convincingly to executives, investors, and stakeholders.
Use AI itself as a strategic thinking partner. Learn how to leverage AI tools to enhance strategy development, scenario planning, and innovation workshops.
Stay ahead of the curve: explore what's coming next in AI – from multimodal systems to autonomous agents – and what it means for your industry and business model.
Prof. Florian Stahl is Academic Director of all Management Analytics and AI programs and initiatives at Mannheim Business School and Co-Director of Mannheim Center for Data Science. His research interests are primarily in empirical quantitative marketing, business economics and information systems research. Specifically, his research addresses business related questions of the digital economy and, in particular, of online social networks and social media. Before joining the University of Mannheim Faculty of Business Administration in 2013, Florian Stahl has held academic positions at Columbia Business School in New York, the University of St. Gallen (HSG), and University of Zurich.
Markus Strohmaier leads the Chair for Data-Science in the Economic and Social Sciences at University of Mannheim. He is the Scientific Coordinator for Digital Behavioral Data at GESIS - Leibniz Institute for the Social Sciences and an External Faculty Member at the Complexity Science Hub Vienna. From 2013-2017 he was a Professor for Web-Science at University of Koblenz-Landau and the founder and scientific director of the department for Computational Social Science at GESIS.
From 2017-2021 he held the Chair for Computational Social Science and Humanities at RWTH Aachen University. Before that he was a Post-Doc at the University of Toronto (Canada), an Assistant Professor at Graz University of Technology (Austria), a visiting scientist at (XEROX) Parc (USA), and a Visiting Assistant Professor at Stanford University (USA). He was Editor in Chief for EPJ Data-Science from 2018-2022 and a founding co-chair of the Computational Social Science section of the German Informatics Society.
Prof. Strohmaier is interested in applying and developing computational techniques to research challenges on the intersection between computer science and the economic and social sciences.
The most effective way to use AI for business growth is to start by identifying high-impact use cases in your core processes – whether in sales, marketing, operations, or customer service. From there, you quantify the potential ROI, build a business case, and run a focused pilot. The AI Business Impact Certificate teaches exactly this process in three intensive days, using proven frameworks from McKinsey, PwC, and Harvard Business School cases.
A strong AI business strategy starts with assessing your organization's current AI maturity, identifying where AI creates the most value, and prioritizing initiatives based on feasibility and strategic fit. Tools like the AI Canvas and McKinsey's AI Maturity Model provide structured starting points. This program walks you through each step – from opportunity identification to a board-ready strategy presentation.
Agentic AI refers to AI systems that can autonomously pursue goals, make decisions, and execute multi-step tasks with minimal human intervention. For businesses, this means automating complex workflows, accelerating decision-making, and creating new service models. This program includes a dedicated exploration of Agentic AI and its practical business applications.
Calculating AI ROI involves defining clear KPIs before implementation, estimating efficiency gains and revenue impact, and accounting for implementation costs and risk. Frameworks like the AI Value Canvas help structure this analysis. In the AI Business Impact Certificate, participants build an ROI model for an AI use case as part of the program.
Presenting AI to the board requires translating technical potential into financial and strategic language: expected ROI, risk mitigation, competitive positioning, and implementation roadmap. This program includes a dedicated session on structuring and presenting AI business cases to senior stakeholders – a skill a lot of AI courses skip entirely.
Prompt engineering is the practice of designing inputs to AI systems – especially Large Language Models – to get reliable, high-quality outputs for specific business tasks. For managers, this means knowing how to use AI tools effectively without needing to code. The AI Lab in this program offers hands-on prompt engineering training in a business context.
Successful AI implementation requires three things working together: the right use case selection, organizational readiness (people, processes, governance), and a clear measurement framework. Companies that fail at AI often skip one of these. This program addresses all three through case studies, frameworks, and a practical workshop.
Today's managers need to be able to evaluate AI opportunities, understand what AI can and cannot do, build business cases for AI investments, and lead teams through AI-driven change – without needing to code. The AI Business Impact Certificate is specifically designed to build exactly these skills, in three days, for professionals from any background.
