IAEE Faculty Insights – October

AI Agent Workshop to Create a Virtual Teaching Assistant – IAEE Faculty Insights – October 2026

Friday, 30 October 2026

1:30 PM – 2:00 PM CT

How might an AI agent support you and your students throughout a course? This hands-on Faculty Community Insights session will demonstrate how to use Microsoft Copilot to build a virtual teaching assistant for an event management course. Participants will follow along to create their own AI agent and explore how course-specific instructions and resources can be used to support teaching and student learning.

Objectives:

• Identify potential applications for an AI agent within their own courses.
• Review agent instructions and parameters to guide an AI teaching assistant and align it with their specific course needs.
• Create a virtual teaching assistant using Microsoft Copilot that can be adapted to support their own course needs.

Instructor: Jessica Wiitala, Ph.D., MBA, CMM, CHIA, is an Associate Professor of Event Management at High Point University, where she teaches courses in event marketing, finance, experience design, risk management, and meeting and conference planning. She earned her Ph.D. in Hospitality Management from the University of Central Florida’s Rosen College of Hospitality Management and holds an MBA in Marketing and a B.S. in Hospitality and Event Management. She is also a Certified Meeting Manager (CMM) and a Certified Hotel Industry Analytics (CHIA) professional.

Prior to entering academia, Dr. Wiitala spent more than a decade in the hospitality and events industry, with experience in hotels, resorts, country clubs, and corporate event planning. Her research focuses on event experience design, marketing and consumer behavior, risk perception, and safety and security within events, tourism, and attractions. She is particularly interested in connecting research and industry practice and creating applied learning experiences that prepare students for careers in the events industry.