American University, other top M.B.A. programs reorient courses around artificial intelligence; ‘It has eaten our world’
4 min
At the Wharton School this spring, Prof. Ethan Mollick assigned students the task of automating away part of their jobs.
Mollick tells his students at the University of Pennsylvania to expect to feel insecure about their own capabilities once they understand what artificial intelligence can do.
“You haven’t used AI until you’ve had an existential crisis,” he said. “You need three sleepless nights.”
Top business schools are pushing M.B.A. candidates and undergraduates to use artificial intelligence as a second brain. Students are eager for the instruction as employers increasingly hire talent with AI skills .
American University’s Kogod School of Business is putting an unusually high emphasis on AI, threading teaching on the technology through 20 new or adapted classes, from forensic accounting to marketing, which will roll out next school year. Professors this week started training on how to use and teach AI tools.
Understanding and using AI is now a foundational concept, much like learning to write or reason, said David Marchick, dean of Kogod.
“Every young person needs to know how to use AI in whatever they do,” he said of the decision to embed AI instruction into every part of the business school’s undergraduate core curriculum.
Marchick, who uses ChatGPT to prep presentations to alumni and professors, ordered a review of Kogod’s coursework in December after Brett Wilson, a venture capitalist with Swift Ventures, visited campus and told students that they wouldn’t lose jobs to AI, but rather to professionals who are more skilled in deploying it.
American’s new AI classwork will include text mining, predictive analytics and using ChatGPT to prepare for negotiations, whether navigating workplace conflict or advocating for a promotion. New courses include one on AI in human-resource management and a new business and entertainment class focused on AI, a core issue of last year’s Hollywood writers strike.
Officials and faculty at Columbia Business School and Duke University’s Fuqua School of Business say fluency in AI will be key to graduates’ success in the corporate world, allowing them to climb the ranks of management. Forty percent of prospective business-school students surveyed by the Graduate Management Admission Council said learning AI is essential to a graduate business degree—a jump from 29% in 2022.
Many of them are also anxious that their jobs could be replaced by generative AI. Much of entry-level work could be automated, the management-consulting group Oliver Wyman projected in a recent report. That means that future early-career jobs might require a more muscular skillset and more closely resemble first-level management roles .
Business-school professors are now encouraging students to use generative AI as a tool, akin to a calculator for doing math.
M.B.A.s should be using AI to generate ideas quickly and comprehensively, according to Sheena Iyengar, a Columbia Business School professor who wrote “Think Bigger,” a book on innovation. But it’s still up to people to make good decisions and ask the technology the right questions.
“You still have to direct it, otherwise it will give you crap,” she said. “You cannot eliminate human judgment.”
One exercise that Iyengar walks her students through is using AI to generate business idea pitches from the automated perspectives of Tom Brady, Martha Stewart and Barack Obama. The assignment illustrates how ideas can be reframed for different audiences and based on different points of view.
Blake Bergeron, a 27-year-old M.B.A. student at Columbia, used generative AI to brainstorm new business ideas for a project last fall. One it returned was a travel service that recommends destinations based on a person’s social networks, pulling data from their friends’ posts. Bergeron’s team asked the AI to pressure-test the idea, coming up with pros and cons, and for potential business models.
Bergeron said he noticed pitfalls as he experimented. When his team asked the generative AI tool for ways to market the travel service, it spit out a group of very similar ideas. From there, Bergeron said, the students had to coax the tool to get creative, asking for one out-of-the-box idea at a time.
Professors say that through this instruction, they hope students learn where AI is currently weak. Mathematics and citations are two areas where mistakes abound. At Kogod this week, executives who were training professors in AI stressed that adopters of the technology needed to do a human review and edit all AI-generated content, including analysis, before sharing the materials.
When Robert Bray, who teaches operations management at Northwestern’s Kellogg School of Management, realised that ChatGPT could answer nearly every question in the textbook he uses for his data analytics course, he updated the syllabus. Last year, he started to focus on teaching coding using large-language models, which are trained on vast amounts of data to generate text and code. Enrolment jumped to 55 from 21 M.B.A. students, he said.
Before, engineers had an edge against business graduates because of their technical expertise, but now M.B.A.s can use AI to compete in that zone, Bray said.
He encourages his students to offload as much work as possible to AI, treating it like “a really proficient intern.”
Ben Morton, one of Bray’s students, is bullish on AI but knows he needs to be able to work without it. He did some coding with ChatGPT for class and wondered: If ChatGPT were down for a week, could he still get work done?
Learning to code with the help of generative AI sped up his development.
“I know so much more about programming than I did six months ago,” said Morton, 27. “Everyone’s capabilities are exponentially increasing.”
Several professors said they can teach more material with AI’s assistance. One said that because AI could solve his lab assignments, he no longer needed much of the class time for those activities. With the extra hours he has students present to their peers on AI innovations. Campus is where students should think through how to use AI responsibly, said Bill Boulding , dean of Duke’s Fuqua School.
“How do we embrace it? That is the right way to approach this—we can’t stop this,” he said. “It has eaten our world. It will eat everyone else’s world.”
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The Matildas captain has joined one of the world’s most exclusive luxury watch brands, sharing candid insights into the sacrifices required to succeed at the highest level of world football.
3 min
Australian football superstar and Matildas captain Sam Kerr has joined one of the world’s most exclusive luxury watch brands, reflecting on the sacrifices behind a career at the pinnacle of professional sport and revealing she only signed with her new club last week.
As Richard Mille’s first and only Australian partner, Kerr has joined an elite group of global athletes, artists and innovators associated with one of the world’s most prestigious watchmakers.
Speaking in Sydney, the 32-year-old reflected on her next chapter, the extraordinary growth of women’s football and the personal sacrifices required to reach the top of the game.
Founded in 2001, Richard Mille has built a reputation for producing some of the world’s most technically advanced and exclusive timepieces. The Swiss watchmaker is renowned for its use of ultra-lightweight materials, Formula One-inspired engineering and limited-production watches that often sell for hundreds of thousands of dollars and, in some cases, more than $1 million.
Its ambassadors include tennis great Rafael Nadal, Formula One stars Charles Leclerc and Lando Norris, actress Michelle Yeoh and sprint champion Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.
During the Sydney event, Kerr wore the Richard Mille RM 07-04 Automatic Sport, a lightweight model featuring a pink case, blue strap and skeletonised movement. Designed for active lifestyles, the watch reflects the brand’s philosophy of combining high-performance engineering with luxury craftsmanship.
For Kerr, becoming the brand’s first Australian partner is a source of considerable pride.
“Of course, being the only Australian is incredible to me,” she said. “I am very proud to be Australian and I like to put Australia on the map.”
The announcement comes as Kerr prepares for the next stage of her football career following her departure from Chelsea after six-and-a-half years.
While speculation around her future has been mounting for months, Kerr revealed a decision was only finalised recently.
“Everyone thinks that it was decided and I’ve known that (it was) reported that I’d signed somewhere in April, but honestly, I only signed my contract on Wednesday last week,” she said.
“I really hadn’t decided what I was going to do until last week.”
Kerr said she expects details of her new club to be announced around the beginning of July once her Chelsea contract officially concludes.
Despite her excitement about what lies ahead, she admitted leaving one of the world’s biggest football clubs has been emotional.
“I am really sad about it,” she said. “It’s been my home for 6.5 years. I have so many good memories there. I have so many amazing teammates. I’m sad to leave.
“It sucks to leave such a big club like Chelsea too, but it comes to an end to everything, right?”
The 32-year-old also reflected on the transformation of women’s football during her career, describing the Matildas’ rise from relative obscurity to household-name status as one of her proudest achievements.
“What the Matildas have done over the last four or five years has been incredible,” she said.
“The most important thing for me is that you leave the game in a better place.”
Kerr noted that when she began playing, there were few professional pathways for women, limited sponsorship opportunities and crowds that bore little resemblance to those regularly attending matches today.
“We are a part of that generation that still knows what it was like when there was no one in the crowd,” she said.
Today, she said, crowds of tens of thousands remain something the team never takes for granted.
“Even last night we had 20,000 on a Tuesday night nearly. That’s special to us,” she said.
“We feel very lucky that people come out and spend their money and come to a game and watch us.”
Yet behind the accolades, sponsorships and sold-out stadiums, Kerr said there have been significant personal sacrifices.
“I’ve been living out of home since I was 17 years old. I’ve missed a lot of my family’s life,” she said.
“I’ve missed a lot of weddings. I’ve missed funerals. I’ve missed so many things that people don’t see.”
Kerr revealed she was unable to return home for her grandmother’s funeral last year because of football commitments.
“You have to love what you’re doing. You have to want to sacrifice,” she said.
“Everyone makes sacrifices, of course, and what I do is a massive privilege, but there comes a lot of sacrifice with it.”
Away from football, Kerr said Australia remains central to her identity despite spending much of her adult life overseas.
“I think we take for granted in Australia the beaches, the ocean, the open spaces,” she said.
As she prepares for a new club, a new season and a new role with Richard Mille, Kerr said she remains motivated by the same passion that first drew her to the game as a teenager.
“It was really organic,” she said of her relationship with the luxury watchmaker.
“It’s a real family brand.”
