Business Schools Are Going All In on AI

Top business schools are integrating AI into their curricula to prepare students for the changing job market. Schools like the Wharton School, American University's Kogod School of Business, Columbia Business School, and Duke University's Fuqua School of Business are emphasizing AI skills across various courses, WSJ reported Wednesday. Professors are encouraging students to use AI as a tool for generating ideas, preparing for negotiations, and pressure-testing business concepts. However, they stress that human judgment remains crucial in directing AI and making sound decisions. An excerpt from the story: 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, said Robert Bray, who teaches operations management at Northwestern's Kellogg School of Management. 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."

Also

[boulat]

Would be a good idea for engineering schools to integrate business in their curriculum and eliminate the need to hire an MBA.

LOL!

[Busman85]

Business students don't learn a whole lot anyway; mostly they seem to learn to game the system to pass... arguably, a great skill in the social climbing that is management. Easiest major in college.... seriously, counselors say so; that is where I got my opinion after hearing it so much.

An MBA is different.
Still, an Engineer is the opposite of an MBA so that is a laughable combination if it wasn't potentially so much more evil than an MBA. Makes me think of those work place efficiency people who make your l

Re:LOL!

[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

MBA students don't learn a lot of content either. Honestly the MBA is basically a coding bootcamp; it makes sure everyone has some basic knowledge of the field (101-level or so of finance, accounting, strategy, etc.), that's about it. Most of the "learning" is how to present yourself to others, how to work in teams, how to network, adding a bit of "polish" to you as a person. Nothing complicated, just common sense stuff for neurotypical adults. All things engineers can master, easily.

There's nothing evil that's intrinsic to MBAs either. You don't become a better or worse person after your MBA. However, you may find yourself in roles that pressure you to make decisions, or enforce decisions, that prioritize profits at the expense of people. You can go against that (and often times get fired or damage your professional future), or cave in. Engineers do the same (that's how we get enshittification of most tech services).

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[ranton]

Engineers do the same (that's how we get enshittification of most tech services).

I hadn't thought of that before, but you're right that the IT equivalent of an MBA prioritizing profit above all else is an engineer who is willing to deliver substandard work because of a deadline or lack of resources. Both are put in a no-win situation, but have the choice to stand by their ethics at the expense of their career. And almost no one stands by their ethics (myself included).

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[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

Kudos for admitting it - same for me, I've had to "make decisions" I disagreed with, but it's that or me losing my job with a mortgage on my head. So I justify it to myself. It sucks. Also, your signature quote is on point.

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[jbengt]

I hadn't thought of that before, but you're right that the IT equivalent of an MBA prioritizing profit above all else is an engineer who is willing to deliver substandard work because of a deadline or lack of resources.

An engineer is much more likely to be sued for their substandard work, though, and in the worst cases licenses may be revoked.

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[lordlod]

There's nothing evil that's intrinsic to MBAs either.

I have an engineering degree and an MBA (and an IT degree). Before I did the MBA I had a lot of vague bad feelings about MBAs and the folk they produce. Now I have very specific bad feelings.

I believe degrees shape you as a person. Engineers are trained, through classes, group projects, and a consistent problem approach to see the world in a particular way. It has a lot of significant advantages, engineers work well together because of that shared worldview. Legal degrees shape people to view the world an

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[AnOnyxMouseCoward]

I appreciate the response. I also have an engineering degree and an MBA, and my experience has been a bit difference than yours.

In my personal experience, the education (both engineering and MBA) taught me basic skills. It may have shaped how I approach problems (split into logical blocks, try to understand every single detail of every situation and the exception cases, etc.), but not the worldview. Even during the MBA, other than some operations classes where you had to optimize for output / profit, most

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[gweihir]

I do not think that would work. Engineers already can take business electives. Often, they are deeply disgusted by what they "learn" there. Losing good engineers because you force them to do crappy business courses (and no other type exists) is not a good idea.

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[OrangeTide]

I disagree. I find it very comforting that we've isolated and concentrated into one place the personality types that would sell their own grandmother. It's kind of the same philosophy behind having prison. There are certain people that you don't want roaming around with innocent people. I'm sure MBAs like to think of themselves as wolves among the sheep. Fine. If that's the metaphor people like, then I guess I'm a sheep. But in all the old fables aren't the wolves the bad guys that get killed in the end?

P.S

The Associative Property

[Spinlock_1977]

MBA + AI = Engineer

Therefore, by the associative property:

Engineer - Intelligence = MBA

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[chipperdog]

A truer analysis has never been written...
You win the Internet!!

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[zlives]

funny? no no +5 insightful

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[zlives]

also here is some pressure,
no do marketing

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[williamyf]

MBA + AI = Engineer

Therefore, by the associative property:

Engineer - Intelligence = MBA

I am an Engineer (electronics, whith emphasis in Compouter arch, telecoms and Datacomm), but I also am an MBA.

Last time I checked, I did not get a lobotomy while doing the MBA.

Six years AFTER the MBA, I mastered Cloud Computing infrastructure (Servers + Storage + Openstack). My role was to tech that to TTelecom Operators in LatAm.

Think what you may about that. Adjust your analysis accordingly.

Must be a rounding error...

[thragnet]

From Wikipedia:

"However, many important and interesting operations are non-associative; some examples include subtraction, exponentiation, and the vector cross product. In contrast to the theoretical properties of real numbers, the addition of floating point numbers in computer science is not associative, and the choice of how to associate an expression can have a significant effect on rounding error."

Plus, the associative property only applies to the same operation. But your statement still holds, excellen

Re:

[Freed]

False. The only operation involved here is addition because the subtraction operation is defined as adding to something the additive inverse of something else. Hence, the OP correctly applied the AP.

Re:

[Freed]

I better clarify:

(MBA + AI) - AI
= (MBA + AI) + (-AI)
= MBA + [AI + (-AI)]
= MBA + 0
= MBA

Note that the associative property is not applied to the subtraction operation here.

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[gweihir]

Yep. Business "graduates" are probably the only major "academic" group that does not actually qualify as academics because they do not learn how to think.

More like they're being paid to.

[Eunomion]

By the crypto-style con artists pursuing AI.

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[gweihir]

I do not think they are. They are stupid enough to do this for free or even pay for the privilege of getting scammed.

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[Eunomion]

I'm sure they'll pass the good word on to their students/marks. A business school is little more than a grifting academy, where they literally teach people the toolkit of being a thieving sociopath. And, of course, the easiest marks are always those dumb enough to pay for thieving lessons.

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[gweihir]

Hehehehe, true! "Grifting Academy", I like that. Of course, the "best" ones indoctrinate their graduates into thinking that they are all pillars of society. That is probably what makes them so expensive.

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[Eunomion]

The credo of every (American) business school: "What is good for business is good for America. And what is good for me, is good for business. Therefore, I am America."

to be fair

[aldousd666]

To be fair, if any of the major cloud providers went down, pretty much all business, whether their coders need the internet as a reference or not would be S.O.L. So this isn't limited to ChatGPT specifically. It does speak to the vast dependency of our economy on our tech platforms though.

building themselves into obsolence

[sdinfoserv]

AI has 1 purpose in the corporate world, replace workers. It's called ROI so the C-levels can get larger bonuses and the share holder equity increases. In 10 years these kids going "all in" will find themselves out of a job by the very technology they want to build. how ironic. They'll have MBA's and 6 figure debt loads without any job prospects. Congratulations, you'll all be surfs.

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[ranton]

Most technological advances had the purpose of replacing workers. 500 years ago you needed 80-90 farmers for every 100 people in your community. 100 years ago you needed 30 farmers, and today you need 4. That profession lost 95% of its workforce over the past few centuries because of technological advances.

Today the US worker is about 3x as productive as we were 100 years ago. Along with more people entering the workforce (mostly women) this productivity boost allows us to consume about 6x as many goods and

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[gweihir]

AI does not and cannot improve productivity. It can deliver the same or worse productivity in some low-mental-skill desk job areas, but that is it. And that is why this is different.

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[gweihir]

Indeed. Business is probably the only major field that requires and expects so little actual thinking or insight of its graduates that it may actually be possible to replace most of them with Artificial Incompetence. Meanwhile, good engineers and other good STEM graduates will never be wanting for a job for long, because AI cannot even to _simple_ things in that space with remotely the reliability and accuracy needed to make it work.

What for?

[Opportunist]

So future CEOs can see with their own eyes what every engineer knew years ago? That they can be replaced with a magic-8-ball without any loss of quality, and that AI only takes it to a level low enough for MBAs to understand it?

OMG funny!

[Local ID10T]

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

hahahaha.
Oh, wait. You're serious. Let me laugh even harder.
HAHAHAHAHAHA.

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[gweihir]

They really wrote that? The mind boggles. These people are even more stupid and arrogant than I thought.

Well, I guess business people really have no effective intelligence. They will learn. They will not _understand_ why they keep failing at anything engineering (because "understanding" is not actually something they have in their skill-set), but statistics and failed businesses will tell them. Meanwhile all good (!) engineers can walk away from any job they do not like and find a better one and that is not

Interesting... but?

[aaarrrgggh]

I hope they are doing a lot more statistics coursework. Using generative AI for some things makes sense but knowing when it puts you at risk is what is really important.

Will be fun to watch what happens to them in 5 years as far as who is out of a job first.

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[gweihir]

Indeed. As to STEM people, yes there are slumps in the market, but the only thing that can replace a good (!) STEM graduate is a good STEM graduate in the same or a reasonably close field and generative AI will not change that one bit.

No surprise

[gweihir]

They likely have the lowest possible academic standards and often seem to hand out their degrees as participation trophies, with the only requirement that you can learn and regurgitate a lot of facts. Obviously, economics graduates are both easy to make and easy to replace. Also obviously, these business "schools" are not trying to fix their act, but are just trying to make more profit.

I admittedly found out late in life (when I tried to teach some business graduates for a continued education course last year) that these people are just as full of themselves as they are incapable of actual critical thinking or understanding things. Funnily, the same content got praise from my engineering graduates also doing continued education in a related area. It really cannot have been me. Well, I now understand why all my fellow CS students back when that had something in the business field as elective were so utterly dismissive about and disgusted by the business students they met there. And I am not teaching any business students again.

While engineers, and more generally STEM graduates, are taught to be careful thinkers and that we are all limited and that knowing one's limits is essential for sound solutions that do not end up killing people or worse, business graduates are apparently taught that they are the elite that runs and rules the world. When in actual reality most of their theory is not even sound and these graduates cause major catastrophes time and again due to sheer incapability.

So let them use AI, because these "students" may be the ones that can actually be replaced by AI with no significant loss. My CS students clearly will not. Just today, several again tried ChatGPT on a rather simplistic exercise and then (when I asked) told me it was completely useless.

When consultants attack!

[sinkskinkshrieks]

No one will be safe from hype, jargon, or chaotic changes without clear benefits or privacy policies.

AI

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