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• Now that ChatGPT and other AI platforms can apply basic knowledge with ease, business students need to develop stronger critical thinking skills and heightened emotional intelligence.
• In an AI-driven world, time in our face-to-face classroom sessions is better spent guiding students through real-world challenges than lecturing about business principles.
• In response to an increasingly competitive and heterogeneous market, the most successful business schools will remain adaptable as they innovate their curricula and learning processes to prepare students for an uncertain new world.

 
These are challenging times for business schools. As we try to prepare our students for successful careers in a rapidly changing world, we are simultaneously worrying about how digital technologies are reshaping learning and how government cutbacks will affect our ability to maintain financial viability.

As a professor of strategy and a (relatively new) business school dean, I have clear views on what we need to do. That said, I don’t subscribe to the “everything must change” school of thought, because we function within constrained institutional environments. Many of our faculty have tenure, most of our business schools are part of large university systems, and the countries we operate in have degree-granting regulations.

But I am equally clear that maintaining the status quo isn’t going to work. Students, recruiters, faculty, and staff all have choices about where they go. Schools that offer “more of the same” will fall into a vicious cycle, in which decreased enrollments, weak student placements, and falling application numbers lead to more of the same.

In short, we need revolutionary thinking about what we do and how we do it, but we need to implement new ideas in an evolutionary way, making sure we bring our stakeholders with us. At the heart of any revolutionary strategy is developing a compelling value proposition for stakeholders. With that goal in mind, I will share a few thoughts about what this new proposition might look like and practical steps for delivering it.

Rethinking Education for a GenAI World

The entire world of higher education has been thrown into disarray by the emergence of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) and the . Business students face a particular set of challenges because of the applied nature of their learning. If we ask recruiters what sort of students they want to hire, they talk about students who have developed strong critical thinking skills, the ability to work well in ambiguous situations, emotional intelligence, and so on. We take it as a given that students must “know” the basics of business—and yet that basic knowledge is now a commodity, available through ChatGPT with a few simple prompts.

So, I raise the question: Do we really need lectures anymore? The notion of a “flipped classroom” has been around for a long time, but the advent of GenAI has made the adoption of this methodology more urgent. As AI assumes more tasks linked to fundamental business principles, students’ face-to-face time with professors is better spent discussing and applying those principles to real-life challenges than listening to professors introduce them.

There are many hands-on ways to make classroom time worthwhile. The case method, where students dissect a real-life business issue and propose a course of action, has been championed for decades by Western University’s Ivey Business School, based in London, Ontario, Canada. Today, this approach is more valuable than ever.

The pure Socratic method, with the faculty inducing student learning through probing questions, might find its way back into vogue. A Socratic approach encompasses negotiation role-plays, interactive simulations, discussions with visiting speakers, and structured debates. All these are forms of social learning, whereby active engagement within a structured milieu results in deeper understanding.

Most existing chatbot-type offerings are designed to provide students with good answers. The next step will be AI tools that provide students with good questions and push students to think for themselves.

What about GenAI? Most business schools have now accepted that students are using ChatGPT to help them write essays and prepare for class, but we must go further. We should be advising students on how to get the most out of the latest large language models, so that they become expert users. This is similar to the approach schools took in the 1990s, when faculty taught their students how to use spreadsheets to do better financial analysis.

We should also be developing and implementing AI tools to help our students learn. Most existing chatbot-type offerings are designed to provide students with good answers. The next step will be AI tools that provide students with good questions and push students to think for themselves.

We are piloting such a tool at Ivey, under the working name AIBEL (Artificial Intelligence Boosted Experiential Learning). We currently are using AIBEL as a kind of private tutor that pushes students to think through their arguments so they can speak more persuasively in case discussions.We imagine integrating AIBEL into our online courses, with users participating in discussions with an AI instructor and a couple of AI students.

In sum, the world of learning is changing before our eyes, and it is important that business schools are proactive in using AI tools and investing in experiential and social learning activities so that students develop the skills they need in today’s workplace. I have focused here on what happens in and around the classroom, but students also could use AI for more collaborative and immersive real-world experiences such as completing projects in partnership with companies and prototyping new business ideas.

Redesigning Curricula for What Matters Most

Employers today expect an undergraduate or master’s degree in business to cover a range of fundamental topics, but there is plenty of scope to structure our curricula in creative ways. We can teach core topics while also adding depth or breadth in other areas we deem important.

With some exceptions, most business schools still organize their faculties around the same topics they did more than 50 years ago: operations, marketing, accounting, finance. Of course, that’s not how the world works. Real business challenges are interdisciplinary in nature and often focused on topics that weren’t on anyone’s radar screen even 20 years ago, such as sustainability, deglobalization, artificial intelligence, cybersecurity, bioengineering, and autonomous transportation.

I am enough of a realist to accept that many of the building blocks of business education—particularly at the undergraduate level—will continue to be taught in their functional silos. But we need to get much smarter about how we pull this learning together to help students develop a joined-up perspective on what’s important.

For example, what if we were to take the notion of sustainability seriously in the way we deliver our curricula?  We would need to go back to first principles in corporate finance, to make sure people, planet, and profit were on an equal footing. We would think differently about accounting standards and corporate disclosure. We would build classes on the circular economy and renewable energy. We would bring in Indigenous and critical perspectives as counterpoints to capitalist orthodoxies.

There are plenty of other ways for business schools to frame a business degree around what’s important. They could take an entrepreneurial lens, focusing all the building blocks of business around starting and growing a new business venture. They might take a leadership lens, putting students at the center of the learning journey, with an emphasis on developing their judgment and characters. Or, they could play off the AI revolution—for example, IMD in Switzerland recently reframed its MBA around all the innately human capabilities that an AI-driven world needs now more than ever.

Preparing Students for a Very Different Job Market

“Structured” recruiting of business graduates is in decline. While big banks, consultancies, and accounting firms still show up on campus and interview in large numbers, the percentage of students getting jobs in these fields—especially at the MBA level—has been going down for years. The job market hasn’t fully recovered from the impact of the COVID pandemic, and we can anticipate that AI will exacerbate the situation further.

How should business schools respond? As a first step, career services teams at some institutions have been diversifying their services: tapping into employers from a wider variety of sectors, taking students on career treks to growth markets such as the Gulf region, and helping students learn how to network and promote themselves in more proactive ways.

The job market hasn’t fully recovered from the impact of the COVID pandemic, and we can anticipate that AI will exacerbate the situation further.

Another angle is entrepreneurship: Schools can offer students courses in new venture formation, as well as access to incubators, accelerators, and venture funds. In the process, we build legitimacy for this exciting and vital career path.

To be sure, we don’t know how the job market will evolve in the years ahead, but it seems likely it will be more competitive and more heterogenous than it is now. Ultimately, these changes may be the impetus for us to innovate our curricula and learning processes in ways that help students build the skills necessary to navigate an uncertain new world.

Investing in Research That Makes a Difference

Rigorous, evidence-based knowledge development will always be at the heart of business education, and faculty will always be free to make their own choices about what to research. But the business environment is less munificent than it used to be. I believe business schools have an opportunity—perhaps even a responsibility—to channel the energies of our brightest minds toward tackling the world’s biggest problems.

Again, I am pragmatic about what’s possible. Publishing in top journals and gaining tenure is Job No. 1 for junior academics. But once that’s done, academics have many exciting pathways they can follow, and business school deans have a mix of incentives at their disposal to help steer researchers toward studying the types of big business issues mentioned earlier. Typically, these incentives come in the form of additional research funding, a doctoral student assistant, or a teaching buyout. They can also be status-based—for example, awarding an academic with a fellowship or chaired professorship.

More important than the topics academics choose to study is the real-world impact their research makes. In today’s competitive market, business schools simply need to become better at translating and applying their faculty research in ways that the business practitioners (and policymakers) care about.

This really shouldn’t be difficult. Business schools merely need to shift mindsets, from focusing narrowly on journal publication to helping faculty also understand that publishing in the Harvard Business Review, or writing a blog, or taking part in a podcast is good for themselves as well as their employers. As part of this shift, business schools also need to direct some resources toward their media and communications teams, which can translate and amplify faculty’s work.

Embedding Strategy Into Practice

At Ivey Business School, we recently completed our strategy, in which we identified four strategic priorities: Transform experiential learning, open more learning pathways, create insights that matter, and expand global impact. An important part of our approach was engaging stakeholders throughout the process. By listening to and adjusting our direction based on their input, we strengthened both the strategy and its legitimacy.

Our next stage is to turn strategy into action—an objective that aligns with my belief in delivering revolutionary thinking through evolutionary change. In part, this effort will be a top-down process. For example, we have earmarked funds to further our digital and international priorities.

Ultimately, strategy is a human endeavor—and for any strategy to succeed, people must feel energized to take action.

But there is also a bottom-up element, in which I encourage faculty and staff to take initiative to support our shared goals. For example, every two or three months, we have an AI Roundtable where faculty share their latest experiments in using GenAI in research, teaching, and operations with colleagues across the whole school.

Ultimately, strategy is a human endeavor—and for any strategy to succeed, people must feel energized to take action.

Carving Out Distinctive Positions in the Market

So far, I have focused on the strategies that all business schools need to follow to help them stay relevant in a changing world. But strategy is also about differentiation—looking for the points of distinctiveness that make your school uniquely attractive to certain segments of the market.

For example, at Ivey, I have made a virtue out of our long tradition of case writing and case teaching; other schools will have their own stories and traditions to build on. While a business school’s efforts to embed strategy into daily practice are crucial, they must also be paired with a clear sense of what sets a school apart.

The bottom line, unfortunately, is that we are moving into an era of much tougher competition, a consequence of government funding cuts, technological advances, changes in the labor market, and an oversupply of business graduates. In a competitive market, every school needs to watch out for the process of creative destruction, whereby established organizations often lose out to new entrants.

The winners, as Charles Darwin might have noted, will not necessarily be the biggest or the richest business schools. They will be the ones that are most adaptive to change.