In David Schweidel’s “Building Solutions with AI” course, students take on a semester-long group project: developing an artificial intelligence (AI) product or service.
One group of students from this class was paired with Georgia Appleseed Center for Law and Justice, a nonprofit organization that advocates for children’s rights, including housing and school justice.
“What they were asking for was technically feasible, but the legal arena is one where the information provided needs to be 100% accurate and you have to be very careful about how it’s presented to the user,” says Schweidel, professor of marketing and Goizueta Chair in Business Technology. “Georgia Appleseed was a great partner for the project, helping the team connect with legal experts who could answer their questions and test the project while it was in development.”
Developing AI Skills
In one semester in Schweidel’s course, students with no prior coding experience build an AI product. Each project had to address a partnering business’ need and/or a broader societal problem. Not only do students go through the product development process, including user testing and refinement, but they also learn critical, marketable skills, believes Schweidel.
At some point, employers will have the expectation that they aren’t just hiring an employee for the output of one person. Rather, they are hiring employees with the know-how to create and manage an entire team of AI workers.
David Schweidel, Professor of Marketing and Goizueta Chair in Business Technology
This course teaches business students how to create their own software solutions and apps without writing code. Schweidel imagines this skill translating into increased productivity, empowering students to create their own tools.
“Whether you need to develop research tools that synthesize data, analytic workflows, or fully functioning apps and software as a service (SaaS) platforms, any and all of these can be prototyped simply by conversing with coding agents,” explains Schweidel.
Helping Georgia Families
Students ranked which organizations or projects they were most interested in joining. Much like other immersive Goizueta projects, the students worked hand-in-hand with their sponsor organization, one of which was Georgia Appleseed Center.
“Georgia Appleseed Center works with families navigating school discipline, special education, and enrollment challenges, but we simply can’t reach everyone who needs help,” explains Michael Waller, executive director of the center.
Each year, upwards of 130,000 students receive out-of-school suspensions, says Waller. On top of that number, other students need special education assistance. Most families have no idea where to start in their legal journey, while others don’t realize that what they’re going through requires or can benefit from legal assistance.
Georgia Appleseed was looking for a tool, specifically a chatbot, to help them expand their reach—to everyone in Georgia. This need is where Penelope Gallardo 25BBA 25C and her team came in. The students wanted to go above and beyond with their brief by giving the chatbot a personality, naming it Seedmore. The chatbot is represented by an illustrated apple with glasses.
“We knew our users were going to be parents and families navigating really stressful, high-stakes situations, and we wanted the experience to feel warm and personal—not cold and robotic,” says Gallardo.
She says the majority of the work was in developing responses, ensuring not only that the chatbot answered according to its persona, but also that the information provided was 100% accurate. The team was assisted by legal experts.
I took that responsibility seriously. I spent a lot of time stress-testing it, refining the prompts, and making sure Seedmore was giving people information they could actually trust and act on.
Penelope Gallardo 25BBA 25C
At the end of the semester, the students’ responsibility was complete: They had created a working prototype for Georgia Appleseed. However, for Gallardo, the job wasn’t done. She says: “I couldn’t let it go.”
Navigating the Legal System—and Beyond
Gallardo continued to refine Seedmore. In fact, because of her work on the —and her passion for it—she went on to intern at Georgia Appleseed, seeing first-hand the situations that some families must navigate.
“Seedmore represents an opportunity to combine years of legal expertise with emerging technology in a way that directly benefits families,” says Waller.
The initial response from staff at Georgia Appleseed was skepticism: They didn’t trust that AI would provide the correct information in a situation where accuracy and responsible responses matter. However, that apprehension quickly turned to awe once they started to interact with the chatbot. Now, Seedmore is being used not only by Georgia families, but also by lawyers and other organizations, says Waller.
“Penelope has been very generous with her time and thoughtful about making sure the tool is both safe and effective. She has been especially attentive to accessibility, ensuring the language is clear, understandable, and welcoming to users with different reading levels or backgrounds,” says Waller.
In fact, several members of the group of students from Goizueta who worked on this project were international students, a perspective that Waller believes helped the chatbot become even more accessible and user friendly, given their experiences navigating language.
Seedmore went from a classroom idea to a live, deployed product that’s actively being used, and that journey taught me more than any textbook ever could about what it means to build something that truly serves people.
Penelope Gallardo 25BBA 25C
Gallardo now works at Cox Communications as an AI/machine learning engineer, where she’s directly applying her backgrounds in business, finance, and computer science. In her spare time, she continues to be a resource for Seedmore. In fact, she’s in conversation with other Appleseed branches across the country for their own versions of the chatbot.
“Emory University gave me both the technical foundation and the broader context to actually use that knowledge meaningfully,” says Gallardo. “The infrastructure we built could genuinely serve legal aid organizations in other states and communities, and that possibility is something I’m really passionate about pursuing.”
“Penelope is one of those people who’s made an outsized difference in the world,” says Waller.
At Goizueta, experiences like this are part of a broader commitment to hands-on learning and emerging technologies. Learn more about the undergraduate Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA) program and how students are applying artificial intelligence to solve real-world challenges.
