VIEW FROM THE TOP
BEYOND BUZZWORDS: THE AI IMPERATIVE
With Harvard Business School striding ahead in the adoption of artificial intelligence technology across teaching, learning and alumni services, AMBA & BGA CEO Andrew Main Wilson urges other schools to take heed and follow suit
A
s a Harvard Business School (HBS) alumnus, I was recently invited to an evening presentation in London featuring HBS dean Srikant Datar. We are all aware of the increasing
is positioning entrepreneurship as a more formal, rigorous element of the MBA programme. I have huge respect for Harvard, since my learning experience at HBS was the richest one of my life so far. Now the school is reimagining every aspect of teaching and learning in order to optimise the use of tutor-bots, course‑bots and feedback-bots. The dean believes we are heading for a “no-code world” in which students will no longer need to know how to use technical coding such as Python – they will simply be able to prompt engineer-appropriate coding using ChatGPT and other AI services. Srikant is particularly passionate about leveraging AI to offer much greater product and service support to alumni. He has asked his Alumni Relations team to investigate how AI can service alumni in a way that has never been done previously. HBS believes that a new AI-enabled job search platform will allow users to search smarter and connect faster with potential employers. The school is also developing multi-language investor and professor avatars, who will listen to student and alumni sales pitches and course queries
on a scale hitherto impossible to service with actual investors and professors. These initiatives are useful to consider and benchmark against your own school’s product innovation. We are all well aware of the opportunities that AI provides, but this might be a good time to consider what your school has planned for this year in terms of AI implementation. Meanwhile, our next event, the Latin America Deans & Directors Conference, will take place in Viña del Mar in Chile from Sunday 24th to Tuesday 26th August. Two of the key discussion topics will be MBA programme innovation and innovative implementation of AI. The conference will be attended by many of the deans and directors of our AMBA & BGA Latin American schools; if you would like the opportunity to discuss these issues and network with senior business school leaders from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Mexico, Peru, Uruguay and the US, you can book your place here: https://www.amba-bga.com/events/latam-2025
global economic and geopolitical uncertainties, but Harvard is having to deal with more significant challenges than most business schools. Srikant has had to manage several major issues, each of which he described as a “once- in-every-100-years challenge”, from Covid-19 through to the ongoing legal conflict with the US government. He was very upbeat about Harvard’s plans and ambitions, but inevitably the school has had to introduce some short-term cost reduction measures. Meanwhile, HBS continues to innovate its MBA programme and has introduced – or is planning to introduce – several new elective courses: Anatomy of Fraud, Crypto, Climate, Tough Tech Ventures, Market Perspectives and Gen AI. Harvard is also implementing greater flexibility in terms of its elective curriculum to allow multiple internships and
38 Ambition • ISSUE 3 • 2025
Made with FlippingBook - Share PDF online