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Key Takeaways

• Leavey’s ISBA 2411 has been renamed Natural Language Processing and AI to reflect how far the field has moved beyond classical text analysis.
• The curriculum runs from bag-of-words and TF-IDF through transformer architectures and retrieval-augmented generation—with every technique tied to a real business application.
• It’s a required core course for MSIS students and an approved elective for MSBA students—giving both groups a shared technical vocabulary for working on the same teams.
• Use cases include financial statement analysis, consumer review mining, and conversational AI—the kinds of projects students will encounter within months of graduating.

Ask a hiring manager at a Bay Area tech company what they want from a new data hire, and "NLP" as a standalone skill barely comes up anymore. What they’re actually describing—building pipelines that summarize contracts, flag sentiment in earnings calls, or power internal chatbots—sits squarely at the intersection of classical text processing and modern generative AI. Leavey’s updated curriculum reflects that shift directly.

What’s in a Name? Why "NLP and AI" Changes Everything

The recent course rename at the Leavey School of Business is far from cosmetic. When this course was first designed, natural language processing primarily meant parsing text, counting words, and extracting simple topics. Today, the roles students are hired into require them to build systems that understand, generate, and reason with human language—often using the same transformer architectures that power tools like .

Updating the course title to Natural Language Processing and AI is a signal to students and recruiters alike: the syllabus has kept pace with the field. For students comparing graduate programs, the name on your transcript matters—and this one now reflects what companies are actually interviewing for.

What Students Learn in Natural Language Processing and AI

The course covers both ends of the NLP spectrum—foundational methods that still dominate production environments, and the deep learning approaches now reshaping how companies interact with text at scale. Each topic is paired with a concrete use case, so the math doesn’t exist in isolation from the business problem it’s meant to solve.

Foundational NLP Techniques

The course opens with the essential building blocks of text analysis, including , frameworks, and topic analysis. These aren’t relics—they’re the methods most teams actually reach for when interpretability and speed matter more than raw performance. Understanding them also makes it much easier to grasp why the deep learning approaches covered later behave the way they do.

Modern AI Methods

From there, the course moves into dense embeddings, transformer architectures, language generation, and AI fairness. This is where the curriculum gets into the systems you’re most likely to encounter on the job—and the tradeoffs (accuracy vs. interpretability, capability vs. bias) that show up once those systems are deployed. For students comparing Silicon Valley–focused graduate programs, this section is where Leavey’s course earns its technical credibility.

Real-World Business Applications

Throughout, the course stays grounded in specific applications: sentiment analysis, text classification, predictive text, and conversational systems. There’s also dedicated focus on domain-specific use cases—parsing financial disclosures, mining consumer reviews—that reflect the work Leavey graduates are actually doing at companies in the region.

A Course Built for Two Programs

Cataloged as ISBA 2411, this course carries immense structural weight across two of SA¹ú¼Ê´«Ã½’s most in-demand graduate business programs. It serves as a required core course for our MS in Information Systems and an approved elective for our MS in Business Analytics. That dual placement isn’t incidental—it reflects how thoroughly language-based AI has worked its way into both systems development and data-driven decision-making.

Whether you’re building AI-powered applications or translating model outputs into business recommendations, ISBA 2411 gives both groups a common technical vocabulary—which matters when they’re eventually working on the same team.

"Graduate with the Toolkit" — A Note from Our Faculty Director

That emphasis on a complete, practical toolkit is deliberate. Rather than surveying the field at a surface level, the course is structured so students leave able to actually build and evaluate language models—not just recognize their names.

When Can You Take the Course?

The course runs across multiple quarters each year, so it fits into most degree timelines without forcing tradeoffs. The prerequisite is ISBA 2401 (Data Analytics with Python), which provides the Python programming foundation the course builds on.

The course is regularly scheduled across the following upcoming terms:

Is This Course Right for You?

A standalone NLP certificate can teach you the mechanics. What it can’t replicate is the depth, credibility, and professional network that come from completing this work inside a full graduate degree. The course speaks to three different groups who keep showing up in Leavey classrooms:

• MSIS Students: Required for the degree, and genuinely central to it. ISBA 2411 sits at the point where enterprise data infrastructure meets human language—which turns out to be most of what modern information systems are actually doing.
• MSBA Students: If you’re targeting roles like business intelligence engineer, data analyst, or AI product manager, fluency in language models is increasingly a baseline expectation, not a differentiator. This elective gets that box checked—and gives you enough depth to actually talk through the technical details in an interview.
• Working Professionals: If you’re already in tech and watching NLP projects land on your team’s roadmap, this course offers structured grounding in the methods behind those projects—from conversational AI to financial sentiment analysis—rather than learning it piecemeal on the job.

If any of that sounds like you, the next step is straightforward. Visit our MSIS Program Page or our MSBA Program Page, or register for an upcoming Leavey Graduate Information Session.