Business schools grapple with how to teach artificial intelligence

“We have to teach the new tools, at least at some level,” says Bradley Staats, senior associate dean for strategy and academics at the University of North Carolina’s Kenan-Flagler Business School. Especially considering that half of today’s work activities could become automated between 2030 and 2060, according to a recent McKinsey report, not addressing AI would be a disservice, Staats says.

At Flagler, generative AI training was part of the orientation for first-year MBAs in August. The school has devised training and guidelines for instructors but it’s up to individual professors’ discretion how much they’ll use the new tech in their classrooms. Some have stuck to a more traditional approach as others have enthusiastically embraced developments, placing AI chatbots and image generators at the center of their teaching.

AI, in the B-school context, is multifaceted, says  Georgetown University McDonough School of Business Dean Paul Almeida. “Along with considering how can we run better because of AI, we also have a responsibility to figure out how we can teach them better skills because of AI,” Almeida says. “AI has been around a long time—what’s different now is its applicability in the business context and its applicability in organizational contexts.”

Dan Wang, a professor at Columbia Business School, says today’s AI courses must address the technology’s limits and opportunities. “The goal actually is not to advocate for or promote the use of AI tools, but rather for students to see, experience and understand the benefits, but importantly [also] the constraints,” Wang says.

Wang teaches a core MBA course on strategy formulation and an elective that explores how tech innovations shape decisions. In addition to poring over case studies about companies that successfully have implemented AI, students are required to use it for some assignments. For one, Wang has his students talk through a strategy case study with an AI chatbot. For another case study, students are required to use AI to quickly synthesize a trove of research materials and data in order to formulate a plan of action.

In some ways, teaching AI is like teaching a new language. MBAs will need to effectively translate the technology for the business world. This will require more exposure to the work of software engineers and developing some coding and data analysis abilities.  At Columbia Business School, more than one-third of all full-time MBAs had taken a course in the Python programming language (first offered in 2016) by the spring of 2023, to steep these future business leaders in the vocabulary and mechanics of programming.

“Right now there are a lot of older CEOs who think this is new, it's scary,” says Emily DeJeu, a professor at Carnegie Mellon University’s Tepper School of Business. “They’re not even that sure how to use it. Expectations are sort of muddy at best down the chain. Leaders who communicate expectations and goals around AI just like they would communicate expectations and goals around anything else — that’s going to set leaders apart.”

AI also will factor into how businesses are structured and how they operate. Organizationally, it will grow to become a part of everyday communication, from email, memos, reports and marketing copy to product development through design, software engineering and other processes. Understanding this, too, will be as essential for future executives as mastering public speaking and learning how to lead a team.

“How do you build a company culture that can live through this?” That’s a key question for leaders, says Ethan Mollick, a professor at Wharton.

Trust is a big factor in how generative AI will be used and how it will be accepted, according to Mollick. The technology will create efficiencies in some jobs, he says, but if employees are worried they’ll be viewed as less essential if they find ways to offload some tasks, such as writing reports or making presentations, they won't be as inclined to honestly portray the ways in which the technology is most useful.

For future leaders, the stakes are high: White-collar workers are facing the threat of automation for the first time, and government regulators around the world are struggling to keep up. Close to three-quarters of Fortune 500 chief human resources officers foresee AI replacing jobs in their companies over the next three years, according to a recent survey by polling firm Gallup. In May, International Business Machines Corp. Chief Executive Officer Arvind Krishna said the company expects to pause hiring for nearly 8,000 roles it thinks could be replaced with AI in the coming years. Whether other executives opt to downsize or retrain employees for new roles is a question that will have far-reaching consequences.

Against that backdrop, business schools may play an increasingly critical role for future C-suite executives thinking through the implications of AI adoption.

“I don't think it’s really controversial for me to say that business schools play a huge role in shaping the thinking, the logic, the reasoning of students, and helping students think about which stakeholders matter,” Columbia’s Wang says. “Because that’s how they think of it, too. They crave the space to be able to have these discussions because they know that once they get into the workforce and into senior leadership positions, that just isn’t the space to do it.”