Ensuring that students graduate with skills in artificial intelligence is “critical” to the enduring success of business schools, or they risk getting left behind, a leading expert has said.
Theos Evgeniou, professor of technology and business at Insead, considered one of the world’s leading providers of business education, said that if business schools fail to incorporate AI into their programmes, “people will not come to you”.
“Business schools will become irrelevant because you’re training executives for the world of AI, so why should they come to you?”, Evgeniou told Times Higher Education.
“If students pay you $100,000 [in tuition fees], and they go out and they get paid $50,000 because they don’t create value while some others do, the next generation will not come to you again. You have to keep up because you have to make sure you help your graduates create value with AI. That’s critical.”
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MBAs often come with expensive tuition fees, and Evgeniou said that schools’ ability to charge higher fees “should correspond to the ability you give to your graduates to create value in the world of AI – if you give them that ability, [the] price is not a problem”.
Business schools need to be market-driven and ensure that they are meeting market needs, said Evgeniuo, who is also director of Insead’s executive education programme, which focuses on transforming businesses with AI.
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“If creating value in the world comes down to leveraging AI for science, leveraging AI to change the healthcare system, the transport system, the defence system, the education system; if this requires you to learn about AI, then this is what you should do.”
Business schools should support staff to stay informed about rapid technological advancements, but Evgeniou expressed sympathy for academics trying to keep up with the pace of change who are not experts in this field. Many are “lost”, “overwhelmed”, and “may even be misled”, he said, “because you may think something is important when it is not important”.
Evgeniou described the pace of change as “ridiculously high”, bringing a risk that course content can quickly become out of date. In what he believes may be an MBA first, Evgeniou said that he has made recordings of all his classes free to watch on Youtube and LinkedIn, but said that these recordings will soon become defunct because of the speed of technological change.
“Even if I make the class free it doesn’t matter, because it keeps changing. Of course the readings are changing. I have lots of guests, and their experiences in companies keeps changing. Their use cases are changing. The lessons are changing. Everything’s changing.”
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juliette.rowsell
