“Yes, there is room for the MBA in an AI future as AI cannot replace the strategic and leadership skills taught in MBA programs, and businesses will still need human managers to make decisions and manage teams effectively.”

This is the answer ChatGPT, the language model developed by OpenAI, gave when prompted to answer the question in the title. Launched in late 2022, the artificial intelligence programme has been causing media frenzy with its capability to generate text that sounds natural and impressively resembles human speech. Now, other companies are developing their own artificial intelligence tools, saying they will improve the product even further.

But beyond an online-generated answer, what does this surge of AI technologies mean for business school studies? And does AI always tell the truth?

What are the limitations of AI?

New technology is exciting – it helps us work more efficiently, makes our everyday lives easier, and enriches our knowledge of the world. It’s completely normal that people are overwhelmed by the performance of a chatbot that sounds so realistically human. To many, it feels like living in the sci-fi world of a novel, because it opens so many possibilities for the future.

However, there is another question worth asking ourselves first: can AI make mistakes? In an article for The Conversation, Terri L. Griffith, Keith Beedie Chair in Innovation and Entrepreneurship at Simon Fraser University in the US, pointed out that we need to be careful of the way AI is able to acquire and process information:

“Generative AI are often wrong. Both students of innovation and business professionals will need to understand how the tools generate responses to assure factual answers and correct references.”

Terri L. Griffith teaches managing technological innovation in the university’s Management of Technology MBA programme. She echoed an important point made by editor and publisher Eric Ulken: “Even the best generative AI tools are only as good as their training,” Eric claimed. “And they are trained with data from today’s messy, inequitable, factually challenged world, so bias and inaccuracy are inevitable. Because their models are black boxes, it is impossible to know how much bad information finds its way into any of them.”

How are business schools responding?

When a Wharton professor put ChatGPT to the test and the AI successfully passed a real MBA exam, the business education industry took note. Many universities have already been proactive in ensuring this type of technology doesn’t interfere with MBA admission.

Emily Brierley, Head of MBA Recruitment and Admissions at Cambridge Judge Business School (UK), told BusinessBecause that the university takes the authenticity of MBA applications very seriously. Cambridge Judge is already using reference checks and verifying transcripts and degrees to be able to filter out AI-generated content. “ChatGPT and other AI platforms represent new tools that now also need to be monitored,” she said.

While business schools will have to amp up their vigilance when it comes to AI content, many education professionals also see the unique opportunity this technology represents.

“I think the technology can engage students in forms other than the good old, ‘write a five-page essay,’” Christian Terwiesch, a professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School (US), told NBC News. “But that is up to us as educators to reimagine education and find other ways of engaging the students.”

So how are they doing it?

Using AI to our advantage

Terri L. Griffith from Simon Fraser University is one of those professors who is already finding novel ways to incorporate AI into her teaching. “As I teach innovation skills, we can cover how to engage with ChatGPT and other generative AI effectively. […] How might students write an AI prompt for ChatGPT to help them use design thinking in their work?” she said.

The idea is not to look for ready-made solutions or copy-paste answers, but to find out how the technology can be an additional source of input in your work. Artificial intelligence is not capable of recognising the specificity of different work scenarios yet anyway. It cannot go in depth into all the essential and complex elements that make up an organisation. 

Here’s what Terri does in her class:

“An effective ChatGPT prompt would be: ‘Create a playbook to support design thinking. Include alternatives for expert versus novice team members and teams working virtually versus face to face.’”

Kara McWilliams is another industry professional who believes that we need to embrace advanced technologies in education. She is head of the ETS Product Innovation Labs, which applies AI to learning and assessment and has developed tools to identify AI-generated answers. “Remember when the calculator came into play and there was a big fear about using it? I’m of the mind that AI isn’t going to replace people, but people who use AI are going to replace people,” Kara highlighted for the Financial Times.

Where business and technology meet

People want to go to business school to learn how to adapt to a fast-evolving work environment.

On the one hand, as technology continues to advance, business school will become even more valuable because it will enable tech professionals to acquire managerial and leadership skills which would not be accessible to them otherwise. As Ryan Krog, data science expert and MBA candidate at ESMT Berlin (Germany), said in his article:

“I believe that the knowledge and experiences of completing an MBA would complement the skills many data scientists have already mastered.”

On the other hand, the ways in which technology is changing the world of work is a popular topic for business leaders across industries. As a result, building the right skillset for a tech-driven future is becoming an important part of MBA education.

And although we are becoming more reliant on technology, the driving force of organisations is people. A major benefit from MBA studies is the opportunity to develop soft and leadership skills and a lifelong learning mindset in an increasingly complex world. On a personal level, every MBA seeker needs long-term solutions tailored to their own goals – and even the smartest chatbot cannot provide those (yet).