With the artificial intelligence industry rapidly progressing across numerous professional fields and industries in recent years, USC faculty recognized the potential and importance of creating a major specific to AI. The new bachelor of science in AI will begin in Fall of 2026, providing students a new opportunity to stay ahead of the game and get behind the wheel of AI.

While USC currently has an artificial intelligence for business program, which focuses on utilizing AI and learning about its business applications, the new major will lean more heavily into the mechanics of AI as opposed to the utilization of it, said Erik Johnson, vice dean for academic programs and a professor of civil and environmental engineering at the Viterbi School of Engineering.

“There’s now enough energy around AI that we feel like if a student wants to devote themselves just to AI, there’s enough of a discipline there to have an actual major that just does that,” said Guarav Sukhatme, executive vice dean and professor of computer science as well as electrical and computer engineering at Viterbi.

The introductory course created for the new major, “Artificial Intelligence: An Introduction,” will dive into the basics of how to implement AI algorithms as well as typical problems and troubleshooting when designing AI, according to John Gunnar Carlsson, associate professor of industrial and systems engineering.

The course will also teach the different kinds of AI such as support vector machines and large language models, he said.

The course provides three different tracks to pursue for students who complete the lower division requirements of the major. They are computing foundations and applications, computer engineering, signal processing, and controls, as well as AI systems and operations.

All students will be tasked with a capstone project at the end of the curriculum, Sukhatme said, requiring them to build an AI system corresponding to their track themselves and giving them foresight into the various industries to apply their knowledge to.

“Our goal in this program is to really get students to work on industry-relevant problems … you learn ultimately by building and designing and doing,” he said.

The curriculum also includes philosophical discussions about the ethics of AI development and its application in different fields, according to Carlsson.

“Engineering ethics is certainly an important part of industrial engineers … a big part of what we teach in industrial engineering is … how can you be equitable to workers, and how can you distribute workloads fairly,” Carlsson said. “In AI it’s even more significant because people encounter these kinds of issues in their day-to-day lives, and they want to know immediately how it affects them.”

Sukhatme said questions regarding the ethics of AI consider the limitations of an AI product, the manner and setting in which it’s implemented, what data is being accessed by whom and how to be judicious with its use.

Additionally, students will learn the mathematics and technical considerations that go into the creation of AI models.

“From the AI majors, we expect a detailed mathematical understanding and the ability to invent new algorithms and to do a lot of technical work as well,” Sukhatme said. “USC has the lead in producing technical graduates who will invent the future of AI, will build the next new AI company or who will go on to do a Ph.D. and will invent new techniques in AI.”

Johnson is optimistic about the wide range of industries in which students can apply their education.

“These students are going to be able to go to a broad selection of different companies, industries, research labs, et cetera, to work on all kinds of different applications of AI because it is being studied across every single business, industry field and so forth,” Johnson said.

USC faculty first considered creating the major in Spring 2024 and the curriculum was officially submitted to the University in Spring 2025.

The creation of the major was a collaborative effort between multiple departments at Viterbi. At least eight new courses were developed for the major, and five-to-10 more are to be developed by department faculty in the future, Sukhatme said.

“It’s one of the reasons that many of us faculty are at a research university: because we are doing the research on the new cutting edge of our fields, and we can bring that into the classroom,” Johnson said. “That’s one of the exciting things I think about students studying at a research university like USC, that world experts literally are developing it and then bringing it into the classroom.”

Although USC isn’t the first to develop coursework devoted to AI, Sukhatme says the curriculum is unique compared to those at other universities.

“We think our major, in many ways, is unique because it doesn’t just treat AI as a subset of computer science. There’s an emphasis on the full stack — how do you go from the cool new hardware that powers AI to building sort of software for AI,” Sukhatme said.

Sukhatme said the major is a “timely” degree because the discipline has grown enough recently to become an advantageous field of study.

“I view AI as a tool to help make us more productive. Is it going to change some industries? Yeah, but I think it’s going to change them for the better in the long run. It’s empowering us to do new things we couldn’t do before,” Johnson said.