AI+ brings together courses, workshops, and hands-on activities at the intersection of artificial intelligence and creative practice. From experience design to generative AI in business to emerging agentic systems, AI+ equips students to engage with AI critically, creatively, and collaboratively.
The initiative gives students a shared home for learning, building, and experimenting with AI across courses, workshops, applied projects, and field experiences. Students explore AI not only as a tool, but as a force reshaping creativity, trust, business, entrepreneurship, and the way organizations work.
Fall 2026 | AI+ Event Lineup
Sep 11-13 | Product Innovation Immersion in Shenzhen
A three-day immersion in Shenzhen—one of the world’s leading hubs for product innovation—where students experience the journey from idea to market through visits with technology companies, physical AI accelerators, and factories. The weekend culminates at a leading hardware accelerator, where students pitch an idea for something they want to build. Selected pitches receive project funding and ongoing mentorship to take their ideas forward.
Apply here by Aug 31 (applications close at 5pm)
Sept 12-13 | From Zero to Agent Workshop at NYU Shanghai
A two-day weekend intensive on building personal AI research workflows. The workshop moves undergraduates from passive AI users to active builders of personal research tools. By Sunday at 5 PM, every student should have a working personal knowledge system, consisting of a vault, fetch-and-process pipeline, Claude-powered agent or equivalent, IM interface such as Telegram, and a public GitHub repository.
Oct 12 | NYUSH x 42Geeks Ecosystem Day at NYU Shanghai, 1:00-6:00pm
NYU Shanghai welcomes 42Geeks for a day of exchange connecting faculty and students with a global community of founders, investors, and technology leaders.
Oct 22 | Physical AI at NYU Shanghai, 6:00-8:00pm
Featuring professionals in the field of AI robotics, this event is organized in partnership with La French Tech, an initiative by the French Ministry of Economy and Finance.
Oct 30 | AI / Tech Platform Ecosystem in Hangzhou
A day-long immersion into Hangzhou’s AI and tech ecosystem, exploring how robotics, AI agents, and digital platforms are reshaping industries through company visits and conversations with industry leaders.
Course Features
AI+ courses combine critical thinking with hands-on experimentation. Students learn to use AI tools, question their impact, and build projects that connect technology with real-world contexts. Featured courses include:
IMBX-SHU 100: Trust Experience Design
Protocolizing Trust for Autonomous Futures
Instructor: Helena Rong
Course site: https://helenarong2703.
This course explores how trust is designed, experienced, and challenged in autonomous futures. Students examine the social, technical, and experiential dimensions of trust while developing creative responses to emerging systems.
Generative AI: Generative AI: A Business Revolution
IMBX-SHU 212
Instructor: Gabrielle Chou
A 14-week project-based course where students use generative AI to explore how businesses are being redesigned, tested, and scaled. Working in teams, students identify a real problem, develop an AI-enabled value proposition, create a simple market-facing artifact such as a landing page, prototype, or workflow, and test early signals from users or customers.
Throughout the semester, students use AI as both a creative and analytical partner: to research markets, generate ideas, challenge assumptions, prototype solutions, and refine their business concept. The course culminates in a team presentation of an AI-powered micro-venture, with emphasis on customer insight, rapid iteration, and the strategic impact of AI on business creation.
PCIX-SHU 102: Experience Studio
Building AI-Enabled Solutions for Real-World Industry Challenges
Instructor: Gabrielle Chou
Experience Studio is a project-based course in which students work in teams on a real strategic challenge defined with an industry partner (LVMH, Estee Lauder, Aytpica for example). Students conduct interviews, research markets, test hypotheses, and build AI based MVP-style solutions using entrepreneurial methods and generative AI tools. The course emphasizes rapid experimentation, customer discovery, and the ability to turn insight into action.
Trip Opportunities
AI+ connects classroom learning with field exposure to China’s fast-moving AI and innovation ecosystems.
Potential trips include visits to companies, labs, startups, robotics firms, logistics platforms, e-commerce ecosystems, and manufacturing environments. These trips help students understand how AI is applied in practice and how technology, business models, infrastructure, and creative experimentation come together in the real world.
Possible destinations include:
Hangzhou for AI platforms, e-commerce, cloud infrastructure, logistics, and digital business ecosystems.
Shenzhen for robotics, hardware, manufacturing, supply chains, and entrepreneurial speed.
Shanghai for creative technology, retail innovation, robotics, startups, and multinational business environments.
Potential visits may include Alibaba, Unitree, Shunfeng, Cainiao, and other companies in China’s AI ecosystem.
Faculty
AI+ is developed by faculty working across creative practice, experience design, entrepreneurship, business innovation, and applied AI.
Gabrielle Chou is a Professor of Practice at NYU Shanghai whose teaching focuses on entrepreneurship, generative AI in business, disruptive business models, and AI-enabled innovation. A former entrepreneur in technology and AI, she contributes to AI+ through courses, partner projects, field learning, and workshops that help students use AI to move from ideas to prototypes, ventures, and business solutions.
Helena Rong is an Assistant Professor and Co-Area Head of Interactive Media and Business at NYU Shanghai and Director of the Protopolis Lab (protopol.is). Trained as an architect, urbanist, and institutional researcher, her work examines how emerging media technologies, from blockchain networks to decentralized AI agents, are reshaping trust, governance, and collective life. Her research sits at the intersection of design, urban studies, decentralized governance, and AI, with particular attention to how social coordination is increasingly organized through platforms, protocols, infrastructures, and autonomous systems. She also serves as Research Director at Metagov, Curriculum Development Fellow at the Summer of Protocols supported by the Ethereum Foundation, and a Filecoin Foundation affiliate scholar at the University of San Francisco’s Center for Law, Tech, and Social Good.
Emily Tsiang is an Associate Arts Professor and Director of Global Experiential Learning at NYU Shanghai. Before coming to China, she spent a decade in Silicon Valley, leading global M&A integrations at Cisco, co-founding CULTURE LABx to reimagine startup culture, and teaching at Stanford’s d.school. A frequent speaker on design and innovation, she has shared her work at Autodesk, Airbnb, and SXSW.