Finnegan "Finn" McKinley, a doctoral student in supply chain management at the U of A, has won the inaugural Building a Better Future Through Business and AI for Supply Chain Management Dissertation Proposal Competition 2025. His dissertation, titled "Human-AI Collaboration for Operations and Supply Chain Management Decision Making," studies how managers use AI for demand planning. He uses experiments with human subjects as well as data from industry.

His adviser, John Aloysius, says that "Finn's research helps us understand how looking beyond the technology, it is human use of AI that is the key to improving supply chain processes. Our team has been working on AI for a while now, and Finn very quickly took on a leading role."

McKinley will be recognized for his supply chain management award at an event at Texas A&M University, along with a cash award of $10,000 sponsored by Deloitte and the Deloitte Foundation. He will join three other doctoral students from Yale, Florida and Harvard who won the awards for finance, information systems and marketing, respectively. They will each present their cutting-edge research to an audience from academia as well as industry practitioners.

McKinley's dissertation committee members, in addition to his adviser, are Adriana Rossiter-Hofer and David Dobrzykowski, as well as external member Rebekah (Bekki) Brau from Brigham Young University.