Students in the Business Intelligence Group (BIG)—the experiential learning consultancy program affiliated with Associate Professor Yoo-Seong Song's Applied Business Research courses (IS 494 and IS 514)—spent the spring semester working directly with organizations across industries, including health care, financial services, aviation, gaming, community services, and higher education.
Through the program, undergraduate and graduate students take full ownership of client engagements from beginning to end, handling every stage of the consulting process—from understanding a client's challenges to delivering professional-grade deliverables and implementation recommendations. Rather than simulated case studies, the projects involve real organizations seeking solutions to their operational, technical, and strategic problems.
Over the course of the 14-week semester, BIG managed approximately 12 teams, seven projects, six clients, and more than 65 student consultants.
This semester's projects covered a wide range of challenges and technologies. One student team developed an AI-powered flight compliance assistant using retrieval-augmented generation architecture to help aggregate and deliver authoritative responses on regulatory requirements across two integrated team tracks.
Another project centered on creating a premium indie mobile game, for which students evaluated technology stack selection, cross-platform economics, launch strategy, and project positioning within a US-primary market frame.
Additional teams worked with a financial services company on two parallel initiatives: developing an optical character recognition and natural language processing pipeline to extract structured reimbursement data from payer contracts, and creating a dynamic knowledge base that combined web scraping and manual review to surface billing guidelines from payer manuals.
Students also consulted on research data infrastructure management workflows, conducted an IT audit and digital transformation assessment for the Champaign-Urbana Community Fab Lab, and developed a product management and market entry strategy for a company offering AI-powered ECG diagnostic software.
According to Song, BIG is designed to expose students not only to technical problem-solving, but also to the organizational realities that shape how solutions are implemented in practice.
"Our external partners have been equal participants in this process," said Song. "They made themselves genuinely available to their student teams, showed up to regular meetings, and took real interest in helping students develop as professionals—not just as technologists, but as people who understand how to create things that are faster, better, cheaper, and safer within the real-world environments where those things actually have to work."
Adam Kowalski, CEO of Aero Solutions Pro LLC, partnered with BIG on the development of an AI-powered chatbot designed to help labor groups navigate complex collective bargaining agreements through clear, actionable responses.
Given the real constraints of today's AI landscape and the limited resources available to a student team, Kowalski said the students engineered a solution that was both cost-effective and genuinely high quality.
"These weren't students doing classwork. They were problem solvers delivering a professional product," shared Kowalski.
Jesse Ford, president and CEO of Salud Revenue Partners, partnered with BIG on two projects: one to simplify the processing of payer-provider contracts and a second to automate New York Medicaid billing rules.
"The projects we present to BIG are ones that would provide real value to our organization, but that we have not yet had the time to fully flesh out and implement internally," said Ford. "The work done by the BIG teams gives us a springboard toward implementing full solutions. It is also very valuable to receive different perspectives and approaches that we may not have come up with on our own."
Half of this semester's partners have worked with BIG previously, and several have already reached out, including Kowalski, about continuing into the next cycle. "That kind of return speaks for itself," shared Song.
Recent graduate Sahil Shimpi (MSIM '26) served as BIG's senior technology manager during the semester, overseeing staffing, deliverable review, client communication, and project coordination across the program's concurrent engagements.
Beyond coordinating project teams, Shimpi worked on a data infrastructure project for a research institute, managing regulated student data across multiple federally funded programs. The experience provided exposure to both technical consulting work and the operational side of managing large-scale collaborative projects.
"The BIG experience itself was the closest thing to a real consulting experience I have had at the iSchool," said Shimpi. "The variety [of tasks] allowed me to switch contexts quickly and figure out the actual question behind a vague request, which I have come to believe is most of what consulting work actually is."