Dan Richards is a serial founder and former CEO of a public company and an award-winning member of the Marketing Department at the Rotman School of Management, where he oversees internship-related credit courses for MBA students.
From medicine to law, artificial intelligence is reshaping professions whose core tasks are entrenched. My role teaching business school students is no exception.
Perhaps teaching in many university classrooms has changed only modestly since Oxford was founded in 1096. The lecturer was speaking in the front seats, and the students were listening and taking notes.
Today, AI has fundamentally changed the rules of the game for everything from classroom dynamics to assignments and exams.
Consider some scenarios that are now well known.
You will be given points for your participation in class…your hand will go up when you ask a question. It’s not necessarily because the students have done the assignment and know the answer, but because some students have entered your question into the AI chatbot. You call them and they say the answer from the AI platform.
Assign a 5-page article that will be quizzed in the next class. Many students use AI to distill those five pages into five bullet points.
Schedule group projects and expect your presentations to be edited and, in some cases, largely built by AI.
When faced with this reality, instructors have two options. One is to design courses and assessments that limit the use of AI. The other is accepting that AI is here to stay and incorporating it directly into teaching methods, a path that Rotman’s faculty are encouraged to pursue. Incorporating AI into the course resulted in three lessons.
AI is both inevitable and invaluable
“This is amazing!”
This is a common reaction I see when I show the customer personas I’ve built to senior executives in my network so that students can role-play sales conversations in real time. They were surprised not only by the sophistication of the tool, but also by the fact that it took me 90 minutes to build, even though I had no technical background.
In another course, students work with companies to deploy AI to solve real-world business problems. For many people, this is their first time building something tangible with AI. At the end of the semester, students consistently said that while the course content was valuable, the deepest learning came from leveraging AI to address real-world challenges.
My takeaway: If used well, artificial intelligence is not a replacement for learning. In fact, AI will accelerate it.
AI is advancing rapidly
In one of my courses, AI rose from last place to leader.
That course on effective communication is one that I teach both MBAs and undergraduates. Each week there is a written exercise where students draft an email response to a real-life scenario. When we submitted these scenarios to ChatGPT three years ago, what we got back was overwhelming. It was flowery, verbose, and overly formal. When I showed this to my students, the most common reaction was laughter.
Fast forward to today, and my reaction to the same scenario has become indescribably better. While AI still struggles in some cases, overall it is on par with, and in some cases exceeds, the average student’s work. Meanwhile, the gap between the AI and the best students’ answers has narrowed dramatically.
The culmination of this writing exercise: Each week, students vote for the top three answers out of ten (nine written by classmates and one generated by AI). Over 60 classes have been held over the past three years, and no AI submission has ever won first place. However, last fall, he placed second twice for the first time. Given the pace of improvement, I fully expect AI-enabled to be at the top of the list at some point this year.
My takeaway: AI still lags behind, but it’s moving quickly to close the gap.
Works best in conjunction with AI
Wharton’s Ethan Mollick is one of the leading thinkers on how AI can be implemented in everyday life. in his book Co-intelligence: coexist with and work with AI; He argues that AI should be used to collaborate.
That’s exactly what I saw. I spend a lot of time helping my students improve their writing both in and out of class. Whether it’s a course assignment, a thank you note after a networking conversation, or a cover letter for a job application, there’s a simple three-step path that will always yield the best results.
First, students create a draft in their own words.
Then ask the AI tool to improve that draft.
Finally, compare the two versions side by side and select and combine the strongest elements of each.
My takeaway: By working collaboratively, we can maintain student voice while adding structure and sophistication. In my experience, the combined output is universally better than using both versions alone.
duty to adapt
Given the scale and momentum of investment behind artificial intelligence, it no longer matters how it impacts the way we work. Business schools, and universities more broadly, therefore have a responsibility to prepare students for this reality.
The choice is clear. You can want AI to be a temporary threat and design courses that limit its use, or you can embrace it and teach students how to use it thoughtfully, ethically, and effectively. One approach prepares students for the world of yesterday, the other for the world that is yet to come.
This column is part of Globe Careers’ Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their insights and advice about the world of work. To find all Leadership Lab stories, please visit: Guidelines for posting to tgam.ca/leadershiplab and columns here.
