ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE
This presents a challenge for universities and business schools: ensuring they offer the right kind of experiential learning. Partnerships with companies can act as training grounds where students work with organisations on real-life, AI-influenced scenarios. • Teach with AI, assess without: While generative AI can support learning, it also challenges traditional assessment methods. Many institutions are, therefore, now experimenting with a dual approach: encouraging the use of AI while ensuring assessments measure genuine understanding and independent thinking. For example, the University of Sydney Business School has launched a mandatory ‘two-lane’ approach, where supervised oral, practical and written exams sit alongside the expectation that students will use and reflect on AI elsewhere in the programme. Similarly, Evelyne Léonard, professor at Université Catholique de Louvain shared that the most popular approach at her institution is “to encourage AI use, while teaching students how to use it wisely”. • Think before prompting: One of the most important habits for students to develop is to make sure they remain in the driving seat when using AI, as global head of people development at ABB Guillaume Delacour outlined: “Think first, prompt second. Build your own ideas, structure your thinking and only turn to AI once you’ve hit your limits.” This approach ensures that AI becomes a spark for innovation, enhancing human reasoning rather than replacing it. • Promote cross-disciplinary learning: AI provides new opportunities for graduates to move beyond the boundaries of their original disciplines, helping professionals push their learning deeper and broader. This kind of cross-functional capability looks set to become essential in a world where problems increasingly span multiple domains. While this must be done with ethical awareness and a critical eye towards bias and sources, the technology “has huge potential to develop more well-rounded professionals earlier in their careers”, according to Delacour. Leadership in an augmented future Ultimately, the AI revolution is not about replacing people. It is about redefining the relationship between human and machine intelligence. For business schools, this means developing leaders who can combine digital fluency with self-awareness, creativity and ethical responsibility. By embedding AI literacy alongside the human skills that technology cannot replicate, they can ensure the next generation of leaders does not merely adapt to AI but also learns to lead alongside it.
workforce equipped to navigate an AI-driven future that remains largely unknown. Entitled Augmented Leadership , the CEMS report offers several recommendations for how business schools can seize this opportunity. • Embed AI literacy: Future leaders must not only understand how to use AI tools, but also how they work, the data they rely on and their limitations. Otherwise, leaders run the risk of treating AI outputs as objective truth rather than probabilistic predictions, as Riemer explained: “AI doesn’t ‘understand’ like a human does. It can make bizarre mistakes, yet also digest a complex 100‑page report in seconds.” Ethical reasoning must also be woven throughout business education. In particular, graduates must learn to ask where data comes from and whether the output is trustworthy. • Enhance creativity: Business education must strengthen the capabilities that set humans apart from machines. Communication, empathy, ethical reasoning and creativity remain central to leadership in an AI-driven world. Moreover, every interviewee and contributor to our report emphasised that AI does not inherently suppress creativity; in fact, it can amplify it when used well. This should encourage educators and organisations to move beyond rigid models and formulae towards original thinking and imagination. • Leverage corporate partnerships: Another priority for business schools should be ensuring that graduates gain practical experience using AI tools in real organisational contexts. Companies are not looking for theoretical knowledge that has no grounding in real-world scenarios. As Utku Barış Pazar, former chief strategy and digital officer at Beko Corporate, noted in our report, businesses increasingly want professionals who combine domain expertise with AI capability. “If a university offers an AI master’s degree for computer scientists, I can hire those graduates, but what about my supply chain team? I want them to be ‘half supply chain, half AI’, ie able to build, deploy and manage AI tools directly relevant to their work. The kind of programme needed to train them barely exists today.”
Nicole de Fontaines is executive director of CEMS, the management education alliance behind the renowned international master’s in management degree available at its 33 member schools worldwide
Business Impact • ISSUE 2 • 2026
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