Digital Transformation for a Prosperous Economy: How Simulations Develop DT Literacy in Business Students

Digital transformation literacy is not the ability to define AI or describe blockchain. It is the ability to operate confidently inside systems that are generating data faster than any individual can process it, identify the signals that matter, and make decisions that hold up under scrutiny. This is the competency gap that graduate employers consistently cite, and it is the one that traditional business education is least equipped to address. Lectures about digital transformation cannot build digital transformation literacy. Experience inside digitally mediated decision environments can.

SPPIN Sim as a Digital Decision Environment

SPPIN Sim places students inside a live, data-rich simulation where every decision they make is immediately translated into KPI movement across multiple dimensions: inventory levels, service rates, cost per unit, margin, ESG score, and SDG impact. Students must read dashboards, interpret trend data, and form hypotheses about what is driving the numbers they are seeing. They must then act on those hypotheses in real time, under competitive pressure, with world events arriving unpredictably. That is digital decision-making literacy, developed through practice rather than described through content.

Beyond the student experience, SPPIN Sim itself is an example of the kind of AI-enhanced tool that characterises digitally transformed organisations. The platform uses AI to generate simulation scenarios from assessment briefs, to process live news into relevant world events, and to produce structured debrief insights from session data. Educators who run SPPIN Sim are simultaneously teaching digital transformation and modelling it. Students leave the session having experienced AI-augmented decision support as users, which is precisely the relationship most of them will have with DT tools in their early careers.

• Live KPI dashboards require students to interpret multi-dimensional data in real time
• World events generated from current news via AI processing introduce genuine uncertainty
• AI-generated scenarios and debrief insights model how DT tools augment professional judgement
• Competitive multi-team structure creates the time pressure and ambiguity characteristic of digitally transformed workplaces
• Decision journals build the habit of documenting and interrogating data-driven reasoning