Business Impact covers the big challenges facing global management education as the world asks more of its future business leaders.
ISSUE 5 2026 VOLUME 33
THE MAGAZINE OF THE BUSINESS GRADUATES ASSOCIATION (BGA)
LEADERS NEVER STOP LEARNING
A meeting of minds Inside Imperial’s interdisciplinary approach to AI, economics & policy
• MOVING PAST PERCENTILES: MAKING EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING THE DEFAULT POSITION • CULTIVATING CHARACTER: LESSONS FROM THE WORLD’S SPIRITUAL TRADITIONS • PICTURES OF CHANGE: SOCIAL RESPONSIBILITY INITIATIVES ACROSS LATIN AMERICA
INSIDE
16-19 MAY 2027 | PARIS, FRANCE AMBA & BGA GLOBAL CONFERENCE
Join business school leaders from across the world in Paris for the AMBA & BGA Global Deans and Directors Conference 2027. Marking 60 years of AMBA and BGA, the conference offers an opportunity to reflect on the evolution of management education while addressing the trends and challenges shaping its future. Across four days, deans, directors and senior leaders will share insight, exchange ideas and explore the issues influencing business schools worldwide, from technological change and shifting learner expectations to leadership, institutional resilience and global collaboration.
Alongside a thought-provoking programme, curated networking and cultural experiences will create space for valuable conversations and lasting international connections. Take advantage of the early-bird rate and secure your place at this flagship gathering of business school leaders.
HOST SCHOOL
PARTNERS
WWW.AMBA-BGA.COM/EVENTS/GLOBAL-CONFERENCE-2027
Contents ISSUE 5 • 2026 • VOLUME 33
05 EDITOR’S LETTER The power of learning from fellow academics, classmates and business professionals 06 BUSINESS BRIEFING News and research from BGA members worldwide 10 COVER STORY SYNERGY BY DESIGN The process of co-ownership and collaboration behind a new master’s degree that combines technical AI training with economics, law and governance in a single curriculum
30 MOVING ON UP
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Aiding the transition from top performer to effective leader 34 IN FOCUS Reflections from graduates of Universidad ORT Uruguay 36 GUEST COLUMN The problem of perception in relation to merit and DEI 38 DIRECTOR’S DESPATCH Forging a fresh take on the future of leadership education
14 DATA POINTS New research on AI’s usage and the barriers to its adoption 20 PURPOSE IN PRACTICE Social responsibility initiative snapshots from Latin America 22 WISDOM IN THE WORKPLACE Leadership lessons from the concept of dharma , the Bhagavad Gita and other spiritual traditions 26 COLLECTIVE PURPOSE Takeaways from Dublin’s capacity-building workshop
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16 FROM MARKS TO MASTERY
A look at what happens when experiential learning activities are no longer the exception, but instead form the default setting around which teaching, student work and assessment are built
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AMBA & BGA CBW LATAM ONLINE BUILDING AI‑RESILIENT BUSINESS SCHOOLS ACROSS LATIN AMERICA: POLICY, PEDAGOGY & PURPOSE 1 DECEMBER 2026 | 16:00-18:00 (GMT) | ONLINE Generative AI is reshaping business education. This capacity-building workshop (CBW) seeks to equip academic leaders with a practical framework to assess opportunities and manage risks, while responding to emerging regulatory and accreditation challenges. Join us in exploring the future of management education and get the latest industry insghts into how policy, pedagogy and leadership development must evolve in an AI-driven world. Language/Idioma: Spanish/Español
Scan the QR code or visit our website to register for your free place: www.amba-bga.com/events
EDITOR’S LETTER
EDITORIAL
Content editor Tim Banerjee Dhoul t.dhoul@amba-bga.com Head of editorial Colette Doyle c.doyle@amba-bga.com Art editor Sam Price
Progress often comes when we learn from the expertise and experience of others, whether this relates to programme innovation or student development WHY WE’RE STRONGER TOGETHER
P eer power – the value of learning from fellow In our cover feature, Imperial Business School’s Tommaso Valletti reveals how the exchange of disciplinary perspectives infused the design process of its new academics, classmates and business professionals – is a key theme in this issue of Business Impact . cross-disciplinary degree on AI, economics & policy. “We spent a lot of time working through where the natural connectivity between these disciplines sits,” he writes of the collaboration between the university’s business school and computing department. Valletti details how the programme ensures that students from different academic backgrounds work together on the same problems. “Structured peer exchange does as much to close skills gaps as any formal teaching,” he advises, before underlining the programme’s aim of developing participants’ “fluency” in both economics and computer science. “Students learning to explain their own strengths to one another sits at the very heart of the core skillset the programme is trying to develop.” At Masters’ Union in India, the focus is on a learning model that foregrounds the value of sharing expertise from the vantage point of a business leader’s industry experience. Abhinav Arora and Mansi Bhargava describe how the school’s curriculum sees practitioners teach full courses, alongside resident faculty and visiting academics. “The model deliberately puts students in
Sub-editor Heather Ford
Insight, content & PR manager Ellen Buchan e.buchan@amba-bga.com CORPORATE Director of business school engagement Debbie Kemp d.kemp@amba-bga.com Head of business development – BGA Richard Turner r.turner@amba-bga.com Senior marketing executive – digital lead Shareen Pennington
touch with people who have had to live with the consequences of the decisions they are teaching them to make.” With its emphasis firmly on experiential learning, the school also encompasses a suite of groupwork activities throughout its programmes as part of its bid to move beyond conventional coursework and get students working with others, acting under uncertainty and showcasing their potential in real-world settings. Arora and Bhargava highlight the benefits they observe when action learning experiences “are no longer the exception but instead form the default setting”. At AMBA & BGA’s series of capacity-building workshops, meanwhile, peer exchange is the default setting, as network members discuss challenges and opportunities on key topics. In a deep dive into the perspectives of speakers and attendees at the most recent iteration of the series in Dublin, practitioners indicate a desire to pass on lessons learned to help others harbouring similar ambitions, while attendees attest to the appeal of the event’s “supportive spirit” and the chance to “compare notes”. In the same vein, a series of vignettes compiled by Centrum PUCP’s Julianna Ramírez offers a window onto impactful social responsibility projects. Together, the cases provide practical examples of how institutions can move beyond rhetoric and become agents of positive change.
s.pennington@amba-bga.com Membership administrator Georgia Herbert g.herbert@amba-bga.com Commercial relations director Max Braithwaite m.braithwaite@amba-bga.com Finance & commercial director Catherine Walke r Director of accreditation & director of BGA services Mark Stoddard Chief executive officer Andrew Main Wilson
GENERAL ENQUIRIES bga-membership@amba-bga.com
Tim Banerjee Dhoul Editor , Business Impact
Copyright 2026 by The Association of MBAs and Business Graduates Association . All rights reserved. Material may not be reproduced without the permission of the publisher. While we take care to ensure that editorial is independent, accurate, objective and relevant for our readers, BGA accepts no responsibility for reader dissatisfaction rising from the content of this publication. The opinions expressed and advice given are the views of individual commentators and do not necessarily represent the views of BGA. Whenever an article in this publication is placed with the financial support of an advertiser, partner or sponsor, it will be marked as such. BGA makes every opportunity to credit photographers but we cannot guarantee every published use of an image will have the contributor’s name. If you believe we have omitted a credit for your image, please email the editor.
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THE LATEST NEWS FROM ACROSS BGA’S NETWORK Business
BRIEFING The need to boost students’ psychological skills to prepare them for business, why female entrepreneurs might be at a disadvantage in the dating world and how mindfulness moderates financial decision-making all feature in this round-up of news and research from BGA schools. Tim Banerjee Dhoul , Ellen Buchan and Colette Doyle report
RESEARCH POINTS TO VALUE OF DEVELOPING STUDENTS’ PSYCHOLOGICAL SKILLS
learning experiences outside university in helping students develop better personal resources. “Students need technical knowledge, but also confidence in their own abilities, resilience, practical experience and opportunities to interact with the entrepreneurial ecosystem,” stated Jesús Juyumaya, one of two study co‑authors from FEN UNAB. Juyumaya went on to reveal that the study found a “marginally negative relationship between subjective wellbeing and entrepreneurial intention”, meaning that those with a higher level of life satisfaction could be less driven to start a new business. “This association may be conditioned by cultural and contextual factors that require further investigation,” he added.
The research supports the inclusion of developing students’ psychological skills at university and business school, as well as the creation of environments where students feel confident in facing challenges and uncertainty. With further research planned to examine factors in a Chilean university context and beyond, Juyumaya emphasised higher education’s role as a connector of actors and opportunities in the entrepreneurial ecosystem: “University entrepreneurship should be understood as a phenomenon that involves both students and the ecosystem that surrounds them. The university not only transmits knowledge: it can also create the conditions that strengthen the skills and confidence necessary for entrepreneurship.” EB
SCHOOL Faculty of Economics and Business Andrés Bello University, Chile
he factors and traits influencing students’ entrepreneurial intentions are the subject of a
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new study involving academics from the Faculty of Economics and Business (FEN) at Andrés Bello University (UNAB). Focusing on students in Paraguay, the study found that those with the highest levels of self-efficacy, or the greatest self-confidence in their own abilities, are the most likely to have entrepreneurial intentions. Noting the importance of resilience in strengthening self-efficacy, the study also underlines the value of
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NEWS DIGEST
was that male entrepreneurs were found to be especially receptive to female entrepreneurs. “Even with the rapid growth of entrepreneurship and progress towards greater equity, diversity and inclusion, it seems that traditional gender role expectations still persist,” commented Xiumei Li, study co-author and an assistant professor of entrepreneurship at Asper School of Business. The researchers conducted a follow‑up survey of just under 1,000 men to better understand the perceptions underlying their dating decisions. “Respondents often described female entrepreneurs as ‘accomplished’ and ‘independent’, but they also frequently described them as ‘domineering,’” recounted Li. “Female teachers, by contrast, were much more often described as ‘kind, understanding and family-oriented’.” The findings raise the possibility of a new challenge for female entrepreneurs, who are already linked to experiencing more difficulties in sourcing funding than their male counterparts. “The goal of the research isn’t to discourage women from becoming entrepreneurs. It’s to better understand the barriers they may encounter, so we can eventually address those barriers,” Li concluded. TBD “Even with the rapid progress towards greater equity, diversity and inclusion, it seems that traditional gender role expectations persist”
STUDY IDENTIFIES NEW CHALLENGE FOR FEMALE ENTREPRENEURS: DATING PROSPECTS
platform, Jiayuan , changing only the occupation. They found that female entrepreneurs were significantly less likely to receive responses than comparable female managers, whereas no such penalty was observed for men. They then looked at how interest in a profile changed when a woman’s occupation was listed as growth‑oriented startup founder or lifestyle-oriented florist, compared with two occupations traditionally perceived as feminine (nurse and teacher). The results indicated a romantic penalty for the startup founder but not for the florist. The one exception to this rule
SCHOOL Asper School of Business, University of Manitoba, Canada
emale entrepreneurs are less likely to receive dating interest from men than female
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managers, according to a new study involving the University of Manitoba’s Asper School of Business. In the study, researchers placed a series of fictitious profiles using AI‑generated photos (with institutional ethics approval) on the Chinese dating
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DIGITAL POVERTY FIGURES SUGGEST NEED FOR REVIEW OF COURSE DESIGN
SCHOOL The Open University Business School, UK
t is estimated that between 13 and 19 million people over the age of 16 experience digital poverty in the UK
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alone, according to a 2023 report. In higher education, this could take the form of not being able to submit an essay because their household’s only device is “being used by three siblings for school” or because their “mobile data ran out mid-lecture”. That’s according to an article in The Conversation by Matthew Hinton and Jacqueline Baxter from the Open University Business School (OUBS). Hinton and Baxter highlight how digital poverty is more likely to affect those from lower socioeconomic and underrepresented backgrounds. The upshot is that today’s push towards technology and the use of video streaming and real-time collaboration tools may leave some students out in the cold unless institutions take action. The OUBS academics then reference their recent work on the subject, published as a chapter in the 2025 book, Creativity and Critique in Digital Learning and Teaching . In it, they detail challenges that students facing digital poverty encounter in accessing online learning resources, participating in virtual classrooms and engaging in remote academic activities. They also detail potential solutions, emphasising the importance of policy interventions and institutional support. “Institutions are not powerless here. Lending laptops and wifi hotspots, offering hardship grants and integrating digital literacy training into curricula are measures that make a real difference to students,” they concluded. EB
NEW RESEARCH FINDS WOMEN COMPETE JUST AS FIERCELY AS MEN FOR TOP JOBS
to sacrifice from a position’s fixed salary to secure the role. The findings reveal that women behave just as competitively as men, if not more aggressively in some cases. In addition, most of the high bids for top positions at firms where there is no large salary difference between the junior and senior roles came from women. In the past, studies have attributed the shortage of women in top positions to them being inherently less competitive than men. This study challenges that assumption and demonstrates that the shortage of women in senior roles is not explained by a weaker drive to compete. “Gender differences in senior leadership suggest organisational barriers rather than a lack of ambition among women,” commented report author Andrej Angelovski, associate professor of economics at XJTLU’s International Business School Suzhou. CD
SCHOOL International Business School Suzhou, Xi’an Jiaotong-Liverpool University (XJTLU), China
behavioural economics study has found no overall gender gap in
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competitiveness and in instances where a gap does appear, it is women who push hardest for the highest positions. The study took an auction- style approach and measured competitiveness by the extent to which people are willing to make sacrifices to attain their ideal job role. The auction asked participants to bid for jobs with different positions and salaries. Participants submitted bids in experimental currency units, with each bid representing the maximum resources (ie effort, training, time) they were willing
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NEWS DIGEST
SCHOOL Technological Institute of Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic STUDY CALCULATES MANGROVE DEGRADATION’S ECONOMIC IMPACT M angroves not only protect coastlines and harbour biodiversity, but they also help sustain the Dominican economy. This is the main conclusion of research conducted by Víctor Gómez-Valenzuela, Katerin Ramírez and Solhanlle Bonilla-Duarte from the Technological Institute of Santo Domingo (INTEC). They estimate that the degradation of these ecosystems exposes the country to an economic impact of approximately $75 million a year, affecting activities closely linked to tourism and economic growth. The study, published in the journal, Ocean & Coastal Management , analysed the evolution of the Dominican economy between 1995 and 2023. In so doing, it found that mangrove degradation is associated with reductions in economic growth, visitor arrivals and the development of tourism infrastructure. According to Gómez‑Valenzuela, the study’s $75 million estimate represents 20 per cent of the revenue that “sustains the Dominican tourism industry” and 1.8 per cent of its national GDP.
HOW MINDFULNESS CAN HAVE AN IMPACT ON FINANCIAL DECISION-MAKING
Approach seeks to take this topic further by directly measuring the effect of psychological variables on crucial strategic areas. In a survey of 449 people responsible for the financial management of SMEs in Portugal, it found that mindfulness – defined as the ability to maintain deliberate and non-judgmental attention in the present moment – was linked to a reduced appetite for risk. This also translated into a preference for greater liquidity and more conservative financial management. “Financial decision-makers with higher levels of mindfulness typically exhibit greater emotional regulation, lower impulsivity and lower levels of overconfidence, favouring more cautious decisions,” Coelho continued. He noted how mindfulness’ association with ethical awareness might also reinforce concern for the protection of organisational resources. “By highlighting mindfulness, the study contributes to a better understanding of the factors that influence liquidity policies,” the FEUC professor surmised. TBD
SCHOOL Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra, Portugal
he presence of mindfulness among financial managers has a tangible impact
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on corporate decision-making and strategies around liquidity and debt policy, according to a new study from researchers at the Faculty of Economics, University of Coimbra (FEUC). “Financial decision-making in organisations is often analysed from strictly rational perspectives based on economic and financial variables. However, research has been recognising that the psychological characteristics of decision-makers play a crucial role,” explains Filipe Coelho, a professor at FEUC and a researcher at the University of Coimbra’s Centre for Research in Economics and Management. The project, PSYCFIN – Corporate Financial Decisions: A Psychological
The INTEC researchers argue that the conservation and restoration of
mangroves and other critical coastal-marine ecosystems should not be seen solely as an environmental measure in an island state like the Dominican Republic, but also as an investment in economic resilience. They are pushing, therefore, for the promotion of economic initiatives that incentivise the conservation of such ecosystems. CD
SHARE YOUR NEWS AND RESEARCH UPDATES by emailing Business Impact editor Tim Banerjee Dhoul at t.dhoul@amba-bga.com
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Synergy design by
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
AI can no longer be compartmentalised if graduates are to be adequately prepared for the forces reshaping business and society. Imperial Business School’s Tommaso Valletti outlines the process of co-ownership and collaboration behind a new master’s degree that combines technical AI training with economics, law and governance
That was the starting premise for the MSc in AI, Economics & Policy at Imperial Business School, which has just opened for applications ahead of an inaugural cohort start date of September 2027. Delivered jointly by Imperial Business School and Imperial’s Department of Computing, it is the UK’s first master’s degree to combine technical AI training with economics, law and governance in a single curriculum. Identifying the root of the problem I’ve spent much of my career working on competition economics and digital markets. That includes time spent engaging directly with regulators grappling with how to apply decades-old frameworks to new markets when, for three years, I took leave from academia to serve as chief competition economist for the European Union. What became clear, over and over, is that the people best placed to shape good tech policy are rarely the people who best understand how the underlying systems work – and vice versa. The same problem exists inside companies: the people making decisions about adopting or governing AI may not understand the technology well enough, while those developing it may not fully understand the wider business, economic and societal consequences of what they build. Regulators need people who can read a model card and a market study with equal fluency. Companies need people who can make decisions about AI and understand both the economics of digital markets and the technical realities of the AI systems they’re assessing. Consultancies, meanwhile, need people who can move between a boardroom conversation about competitive strategy and a technical conversation about model capabilities without the use of a translator. That’s a very specific skills gap and it’s one that neither a pure computing degree nor a pure economics or policy degree closes on its own. So, the only honest way to build the new MSc programme was to build it jointly, rather than to have Imperial Business School design most of it and bolt on a few computing modules, or vice versa. We therefore pursued a path of real co-ownership all the way from curriculum design through to teaching delivery. Integration beyond marketing lines “Cross-disciplinary” is a word that now appears on almost every prospectus and it usually means students take a handful of electives outside their home department. We wanted something different – a curriculum where the AI systems teaching and the
A rtificial intelligence is Moreover, companies are making decisions every day about how to use AI, whether it will genuinely create value, how it will change the competitive landscape and what risks it may create. Boards are making multi-year strategic bets on a technology that changes shape every few months. Competition authorities are being asked to police market power in industries that didn’t exist five years ago. Financial regulators are assessing systemic risk in models few of their staff fully understand. Governments everywhere are trying to write policy for a moving target. Universities sit inside that same pressure, whether we like it or not. For a long time, higher education could afford to treat AI as a technical subject taught in computer science departments, with economics, law and public policy departments occasionally rewriting how companies compete, how work gets done and how governments think about growth. It is also moving faster than almost anything institutions are used to managing, regulating or teaching. borrowing a case study or a guest lecture. That division of labour made sense when AI was a niche capability. It does not make sense now that AI is a general‑purpose force reshaping industries, businesses, competition and society all at once. If our teaching stays siloed, we will continue to produce graduates who can build systems but not question them, or who can question systems but have no real grip on how they work. Neither is good enough for what employers, companies, regulators and governments need from the next generation of leaders.
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economics, law and governance teaching are built to talk to each other from week one, not bolted together at the end. In practice, that meant sustained collaboration between Imperial Business School and Imperial’s Department of Computing early on, at the programme’s design stage. Our director of postgraduate studies in computing Rob Craven and I spent a lot of time working through where the natural connectivity between these disciplines sits. For example, where a technical concept in AI systems has a direct economic, business, legal or policy impact. We then looked at structuring teaching so that students encounter all sides close together rather than months apart. The collaboration with the Department of Computing has been both essential and truly exciting. Computing and economics are different disciplines with different methods, different assessment cultures and at times, different vocabularies for describing the same underlying phenomenon. For instance, a computer scientist and an economist can use the word “risk” in a conversation about AI and mean altogether different things. Getting a shared curriculum to work means getting comfortable translating across that gap constantly and building in enough structured dialogue between teaching teams to ensure that any inconsistencies are caught before they reach students. The other challenge was pacing. Technical AI content and economics/policy content don’t naturally move at the same speed or follow the same logical sequence. Economics teaching tends to build cumulatively from foundational theory, whereas technical AI teaching often needs to move quickly to stay current with a fast-moving field. Reconciling those two rhythms into a single, coherent timetable took more redesign than either department expected. However, what helped was treating the curriculum architecture itself as a joint deliverable, with both departments accountable for the whole programme’s coherence, rather than just their modules. Our inclusion of teaching on law presented a different challenge. While Imperial doesn’t have its own law school, the legal dimension of AI is too important to ignore. We have therefore drawn on leading academic experts in law and technology regulation from outside Imperial to contribute to the legal modules. This allows the programme to combine Imperial’s strengths in computing and economics with specialist expertise in technology law. Again, the point is not simply to add another subject to the curriculum,
but to help students understand how these different perspectives connect. Ensuring nobody is left behind I am often asked about admissions because if you build an integrated curriculum but then admit a cohort that splits cleanly into “the computing people” and “the economics people”, you haven’t really solved the problem, you’ve just relocated it to the seminar room. We deliberately designed our admissions process to draw from a wide range of first degrees: computing, economics, engineering, business and related disciplines. We’re not looking for candidates who already have deep
“We spent a lot of time working through where the natural connectivity between these disciplines sits”
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ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
our links to organisations with expert insights. These include the Competition and Markets Authority, the Financial Conduct Authority, Ofcom and the European Commission, alongside other international bodies. Bringing real-world context in early, through case material, guest teaching and the option of an internship or research project, gives students from both sides of the cohort a shared, concrete problem to orient around. It also helps dissolve the “two tracks” dynamic faster than abstract curriculum design alone. Closing the gap If you’re a business school or university thinking about building something similar, my advice is not to underestimate how much genuine, sustained collaboration is required at the design stage. In addition, don’t assume a mixed cohort will integrate itself just because the curriculum is integrated on paper. While these two aspects both take deliberate structural work, they are both worth it. AI is reshaping industries faster than the frameworks meant to govern it are keeping pace and that gap isn’t going to close through technical expertise or policy expertise alone. It also isn’t going to be solved by companies simply hiring more technologists. Organisations need people who can understand the technology and at the same time, what it means for their business, markets, employees and society more broadly. Imperial is fortunate to have strengths in computing, economics and business within the university, while also being able to draw on leading external expertise in technology law. However, proximity alone doesn’t produce integration, it just makes it possible. Making a possibility a reality revolves around the harder, slower work of building a shared curriculum and shared assessment thinking, as well as a cohort experience where students from very different starting points learn to speak each other’s language by the time they graduate.
expertise in both AI systems and economic policy – very few people at this career stage do. Instead, we’re looking for candidates who show clear evidence that they can move comfortably between technical and analytical ways of thinking and who are motivated by the programme’s interdisciplinary premise rather than treating it as a specialism. That means our assessment of applications looks at how someone writes about a technical problem, how they reason through a policy question and whether they show curiosity about the side of the field that isn’t their academic background. A strong computing graduate who has never touched economics and a strong economics graduate with little coding background can both be excellent fits – provided they’re coming in ready to build the half of the picture they don’t yet have. This brings me to the question I think matters most for other institutions considering similar programmes: “How do you stop a mixed cohort from splitting into two groups by week three, with technical students disengaging from the economics content and vice versa?” We’ve built the programme with this risk in mind, introducing structured foundational content early on. This is designed to get students with insufficient technical backgrounds up to speed on the AI systems side and students without an economics or policy background up to speed on the markets and wider economic and policy context side. Crucially, this happens before the two strands need to work together on the same assessed material. The aim isn’t to turn every economist into a computer scientist or every engineer into an economist. It’s to make sure every student has enough fluency in both languages that they can engage properly with the integrated teaching that follows and can hold their own, both in group work and discussions alongside peers from a different background. On this last point, it’s worth noting that we’ve leaned heavily on peer learning by design. Small-group and project-based work is structured to mix students across academic backgrounds, so that a technically strong student and a policy-strong student are working the same problem from different angles. In our experience, that structured peer exchange does as much to close skills gaps as any formal teaching does. Moreover, students learning to explain their own strengths to each other sits at the very heart of the core skillset the programme is trying to develop. Engagement with external partners plays a role here too, with the programme closely informed by
IMPERIAL BUSINESS SCHOOL
Tommaso Valletti is a professor of economics at Imperial Business School, as well as the academic director of the newly launched Master’s in AI, Economics & Policy. Valletti is also director of the Research & Policy Network on Competition Policy at the Centre for Economic Policy Research (CEPR)
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Data points When it comes to the use of AI, business schools are moving steadily from vaunted potential to practical implementation. Tim Banerjee Dhoul explores exclusive new research that highlights where the technology is being deployed, as well as the forces driving adoption and the barriers left to overcome
implementation strategies. Among those polled, 78 per cent described “being proactive in designing forward-looking programmes and learning activities” as a very or extremely important factor in their institution’s moves to adopt the technology. This compares to 74 per cent who cited “improving student learning and educational quality” and 77 per cent who cited “responding to changing expectations from students, employers and other stakeholders” as very or extremely important factors. The number selecting “strengthening competitiveness and market positioning” as a very or extremely important factor was notably lower, at 57 per cent. Meanwhile, limited resources, a lack of clear policies or guidance and the capabilities of staff and faculty are all high on the list of barriers to AI adoption identified by survey respondents. However, the number one challenge among business school leaders is “concerns about issues related to academic integrity”, with 53 per cent citing this as a significant or major barrier.
rtificial intelligence (AI) is being used in teaching and learning design far more than any other
After all, the picture of AI’s implementation in higher education is one that is constantly evolving, with AMBA & BGA’s data supporting the view that use cases will continue rising. When asked to describe their current stage of adoption, for example, 44 per cent of respondents said AI is “used in selected areas and/or programmes” while 29 per cent preferred to select that its use is “being explored through small pilots”. Just 18 per cent went as far as to say that “AI is widely integrated across the institution” at the present moment in time. Moreover, while around a quarter of leaders (24 per cent) described the extent of AI use at their institution as already being either high or very high, a slightly higher proportion described it as being low or very low (28 per cent). Almost half (49 per cent) described it as being moderate. ADOPTION FACTORS The need to future-proof offerings and remain relevant in a changing landscape appears to be the biggest driver of AI
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area of business schools’ activities and operations, according to new research into the AMBA & BGA networks. In a survey of 114 school leaders – of whom more than half were either deans or programme directors – 87 per cent said the technology is currently used in this way; more than three times the proportion (28 per cent) of those who say their school is using AI as part of efforts around student support or guidance. The other most popular current applications of AI are to be found in the areas of assessment and feedback (cited by 52 per cent of leaders), research support (50 per cent) and marketing and communications (44 per cent). While the number of schools that have already rolled out, as reported by leaders, the use of AI in admissions and recruitment (19 per cent) or in career services (17 per cent) is far lower, these are still significant proportions given how nascent available tools and techniques remain.
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AMBA & BGA RESEARCH
TRAINING & INTEGRATION Delving deeper, the survey found that many leaders fear AI could precipitate an over-reliance on technology and a drop in students’ critical thinking – 81 per cent of leaders either agreed or strongly agreed that this is a concern. A further issue identified relates to measuring students’ progress, with 68 per cent agreeing or strongly agreeing that current assessment formats are not always properly adapted to the challenges created by AI. In addition, 66 per cent of respondents either agreed or strongly agreed that faculty confidence in identifying problematic AI‑assisted work is uneven. Matters such as these point to the value of faculty training on AI. Yet here there is a slight disconnect that highlights a potential area for development. On the one hand, 76 per cent of AMBA & BGA’s respondents agreed or strongly agreed that faculty are encouraged to engage with AI. Meanwhile, 63 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that their institution’s senior leadership actively supports the responsible integration of AI into teaching, learning and assessment. However, just 47 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that their institution provides effective training for staff on the responsible and pedagogically appropriate use of the technology. Furthermore, only 36 per cent agreed or strongly agreed that students receive effective training and guidance on responsible AI use. While partial adoption of AI is widespread, therefore, findings like these help to pinpoint why there may be some way to go until we see AI firmly embedded into business education. The full report, entitled From Pilots to Practice , is out soon and was produced by AMBA & BGA in association with Alexandr.ia, an AI-powered learning platform co-developed by UBI Business School and Publicis.
OF SCHOOL LEADERS SAY THEIR INSTITUTION CURRENTLY USES AI AS PART OF THEIR TEACHING AND LEARNING DESIGN 87 %
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From
marks
to
mastery
AI’s impact on methods of assessment and employer expectations is leading calls for a fresh approach to business education. At Masters’ Union, Abhinav Arora and Mansi Bhargava reflect on the problems of a market attached to scorecards and outline the value of moving past percentiles to make experiential learning the default setting around which a school’s faculty model and curriculum are built
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EXPERIENTIAL LEARNING
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to put students in situations where knowing is no longer enough and where they have to decide. More specifically, where they must act on incomplete information, see what happens and adjust when reality disagrees with the plan. That is what experiential learning means here: not learning that happens to involve a project, but learning in which the consequence of a decision becomes part of the lesson. That principle runs through every programme taught by Masters’ Union. Students build businesses rather than merely writing business plans, test campaigns rather than simply analysing them, make investment decisions rather than just studying markets and work with practitioners rather than encountering industry only as case studies of things that have already happened. Most business schools already have a case competition, startup elective or live project somewhere in the curriculum. The difference lies in what happens when those experiences are no longer the exception but instead form the default setting around which teaching, student work and assessment are built. That is what makes the following three decisions taken at Masters’ Union part of the same system rather than three separate initiatives, encompassing the questions of who teaches, what students are asked to do and how their performance is judged. The case for practitioner faculty The first decision was about who stands in front of the classroom. Academic expertise provides the foundation: students still need frameworks, concepts and the intellectual discipline to make sense of a problem. But judgement under uncertainty is a different kind of knowledge. Someone who has had to defend a decision to a sceptical client, explain to a board why a campaign failed, or change course when the numbers turned against them brings something a case study cannot. That’s why practitioners do not just appear for the occasional guest lecture at Masters’ Union. Instead, they teach full courses, alongside resident faculty and visiting academics. The model deliberately puts students in touch with people who have had to live with the consequences of the decisions they are teaching them to make. In practice, that means a three‑way faculty model: industry
ith 45 million students enrolled across more than 64,000 registered higher education institutions, India has built one of the world’s largest and most densely credentialled education markets. Yet capacity expansion has not eliminated the underlying problem: choice has multiplied faster than differentiation – and in a market crowded with
conventional degrees, there is a clear demand for institutions that offer a different proposition. The opportunity, in other words, is not to add another credential to an already crowded market, but to make the credential itself mean something different. The instinct of treating a single score as the outcome runs deeper than any entrance exam. It is a mentality that pervades the country’s private coaching industry, as well as towns that are built to prepare teenagers for one test. At its root is an assumption, passed down for generations, that a percentile fairly sums up a young person’s capability and that academic excellence is the clearest sign of promise a family can point to. While that assumption has served Indian engineers and managers well for a long time, it is no longer fit for purpose. Employers have been saying, with increasing consistency, that they are hiring for something a percentile does not capture. GMAC’s 2025 Corporate Recruiters Survey found employers pairing enthusiasm for candidates’ AI fluency with an explicit demand for the human judgement that AI cannot supply: complex reasoning, adaptability and the ability to work through ambiguity without a rulebook. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report has tracked a similar shift for several cycles, consistently ranking analytical thinking, resilience and leadership above narrower technical proficiency among the capabilities employers expect to matter most. This isn’t really about AI. It’s about the growing distance between what a scorecard certifies and what an employer needs to know before handing a graduate real responsibility. The default setting While a scorecard can show what a student knows, it can’t indicate how they will behave when the answer is uncertain. The obvious response to this problem is
practitioners account for roughly half of classroom
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a product, source suppliers, build a storefront and run paid acquisition campaigns. The market tells them whether their proposition works. In Content Creation, students build a real audience against a defined target, with engagement data determining what holds attention. Food Labs applies the same logic to physical products and hospitality, where consumer behaviour can diverge sharply from what desktop research has suggested. In addition, these shorter sprints feed into a year‑long Venture Initiation Programme, taking students from problem discovery and customer validation to a demo day held in front of more than 150 venture capital firms and angel investors. The student-run Masters’ Union Investment Fund extends the same principle to capital allocation: students debate assumptions and commit real money under mentor guidance rather than managing a hypothetical portfolio. The distinction is important. Experiential learning is learning in a situation where the world gets a vote. A customer can refuse to buy, an audience can refuse to watch and an investor can refuse to fund – the outcome cannot be edited to fit the answer the student expected to get. That is what makes the Outclass programme so much more than a collection of projects. It gives students something conventional coursework often cannot: evidence of how they behave when their assumptions meet reality. Some of that evidence has already travelled beyond the classroom. Nexera Health, a healthcare concierge for corporates; MemoTag, an AI platform supporting care for the elderly; and Bullspree, a stock-trading platform built around game mechanics all began as student ventures at Masters’ Union. Several have since raised institutional funding and a handful of founders have pitched on Shark Tank India. Just recently, Tanay Lohia, a graduate of the school’s post-graduate programme (equivalent to an MBA) in technology & business management raised
teaching hours; full-time faculty anchor the academic core and account for close to a third; while visiting academics from prestigious overseas institutions make up the remainder. The mix matters because experiential learning is only as credible as the people creating the experience. A live business problem taught entirely as a classroom simulation is still a simulation. The person teaching it should, wherever possible, know what happens when the decision leaves the classroom. What pitch competitions can’t prove The second decision was to change what students spend their time doing. A case competition or summer project can be useful but they remain bounded experiences. At some point, the exercise ends, the judging happens and everyone goes home. This isn’t what happens in the real world of work. This disconnect guides Masters’ Union’s suite of Outclass programmes. In these, students are asked to make decisions against conditions they cannot fully control, with outcomes that provide evidence of whether those decisions worked. In the Dropshipping Challenge, for example, they identify
“Taking merit seriously requires building an institution around evidence of what a graduate can really do”
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$2 million for Mandrake Bio, a venture that is developing programmable gene-editing enzymes using generative AI. The question now is no longer simply whether students were given an experience, it’s whether the experience produced enough evidence to tell us something meaningful about how they think. The harder problem is assessment: if merit no longer equates to a single score, something else must be measurable in its place. Once an institution tries to develop judgement, rather than comprehension, the business plan, the slide deck and the write-up stop being reliable evidence of progress. While they show what a student can construct under no real pressure, they say comparatively little about what that student would do in practice. Grading what happened, not what was submitted Once a venture has real money in it, the more useful question is how the decisions behind it were made. Did the team test its assumptions before committing resources, or discover flaws the expensive way? How did they respond when evidence contradicted the plan they had prepared for a class? A venture that fails quickly after exposing a flawed assumption offers better learning than one that stumbles into short‑term success. Revenue, conversion and retention are not proxies for learning in themselves; they become evidence only once someone is interpreting them for the quality of the decision‑making behind them. The number itself is never the grade. That makes this a more demanding form of assessment than a written examination. Faculty have to reconstruct a chain of reasoning rather than marking responses against an answer key or booklet. Students must account for decisions rather than simply reproduce information. Failure, meanwhile, needs to be treated as data rather than automatically counting as a mark against; something that sits uneasily with institutions built to reward correct answers. This is not a peripheral concern, as several international accreditation bodies have moved steadily towards documenting learner competencies over content coverage. This suggests that those responsible for quality assurance in management education have reached their own version of the same conclusion: that demonstrating graduates’ capabilities now carries more evidentiary weight
than what they were taught. AI is adding urgency to this shift, since it can generate a competent-looking analysis in minutes but cannot take responsibility for the decision it is meant to support. The credential that travels None of this is intended to be an argument against the value of academic rigour. A student cannot interpret a failed negotiation without negotiation theory, or read a customer’s behaviour without some grounding in marketing. Conceptual foundations remain the precondition for good judgement. What has changed, however, is what we should trust to demonstrate that judgement, at a time when a market that has spent generations optimising for one kind of credential is being asked, rather suddenly, to produce evidence of another. A scorecard offers a statement of what a student was taught and a machine can now produce this easily. What stands to travel further, therefore, is a credible account of someone’s decision-making when a supplier disappeared, a campaign failed to convert, or an investor asked a question the plan had not anticipated. In a market that has been so attached to the score, rethinking merit is not a small undertaking. Taking merit seriously requires building an institution around evidence of what a graduate can really do, instead of what they can write down under exam conditions. Fundamentally, that is what a score was always meant to measure.
MASTERS’ UNION
Abhinav Arora is an associate director at Masters’ Union in Gurugram, India, where he conducts career-focused learning and mentoring sessions and leads the school’s accreditation and alumni relations functions. He holds an MBA from the Faculty of Management Studies – University of Delhi and has more than 15 years’ experience across EY-Parthenon, PwC, Reliance Jio and Nokia Mansi Bhargava is a senior manager at Masters’ Union, where she conducts marketing-focused learning and mentoring sessions and heads the school’s marketing domain. She holds an MBA from IIM Ranchi and brings experience across strategy, operations and brand building
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