Wei Chen

Wei Chen is an Associate Professor of Operations and Information Management (OPIM) at the School of Business, University of Connecticut. He also serves as the Academic Director of the UConn Digital Frontiers Initiative, which promotes collaborations between industry and academia, with a particular emphasis on organizational AI transformation and governance.

Wei's research spans both scholarly inquiry and practice-oriented frameworks, focusing on how organizations design and govern generative AI capabilities to transform decision-making, knowledge work, and operations. His earlier work also explored platforms, crowds, and financial technologies (FinTech). His work has been published in leading academic journals, such as Management Science, Information Systems Research, and MIS Quarterly.

His textbook, Generative AI for Business: Frameworks, Techniques, and Governance, is now available.

GenAI for Business Textbook

What's New

2026

Jan 14 Our working paper Optimizing Prompts for Large Language Models: A Causal Approach is available on SSRN.
Jan 6 Our paper The Evaluator Age: Generative AI and the Future of Knowledge Work, which discusses the educational implications of generative AI, is published in the HICSS Proceedings.

2025

Oct 28 Textbook published: Generative AI for Business: Frameworks, Techniques, and Governance.
Aug 16 Our paper Impacts of Process Automation on Software Development and the IT Workforce won the Best Paper Award at the Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS 2025).
Jul 22 Successfully finished the GenAI Workshop for the CT Library Consortium.
May 21 Presented our paper on Generative AI and Organizational Structure at the Wharton Future of Work Conference. [video]
May 16 genai4all.org is online at the IT Teaching Workshop—one step closer to making GenAI accessible. [my post]
Apr 10 Moderated a panel discussion in the Data Disrupted event.

2024

Nov 8 Presented Gen AI for Knowledge Workers at Southwest CT Tech Hub.
Oct 29 Discussed "GenAI and the Future of Business Intelligence" with Stamford BIT network.
Oct 20 Deeply honored to receive the Sandra A. Slaughter Early Career Award from the INFORMS Information Systems Society.
Apr 24 Finished our first GenAI Workshop. Enjoyed the discussion and learned a lot from the participants.
Apr 5 We successfully launched our Digital Frontiers Initiative with the first annual Digital Frontiers Banquet.
Mar 27 Talked at Hartford AI Day 2024 about GenAI and the future of business, and how to customize large language models with prompt engineering and retrieval augmented generation. [UConn Today]
Mar 22 Discussed "How Has Generative AI Affected Education, Research, and Practice" in a panel at the MIS 50th academic conference.
Mar 21 Gave a talk about our recent paper about the transprancy of foundation models and firms' strategic fine-tuning efforts in a research seminar at the Rady School of Management, UC San Diego.
Feb 23 We started the Digital Frontiers Seminar series with a talk about "Generative AI and the Future of Business" at UConn Stamford.
Jan 11 Gave a talk to high school students at the Academy of Information Technology and Engineering (AITE) in Stamford.

2023

Aug 23 Joined the UConn School of Business as an Associate Professor in the Operations and Information Management Department, with an additional appointment as the Academic Director of the Connecticut Information Technology Institute.
Apr 28 Obtained my tenure letter from the University of Arizona.