Lee Newman, Dean of IE Business School, with students at IE Tower, the tech and sustainable campus of IE University in Madrid. IE University in Spain has announced a new collaboration with OpenAI, making it one of the first institutions to provide university-wide ChatGPT Edu to all of its 10,000 students, faculty, and staff across its six academic schools.
If you aren’t convinced that Artificial Intelligence is already transforming the workplace, just consider Salesforce. The platform has long been a must-know for marketing professionals, so much so that leading business schools integrate it into lessons on sales, marketing, customer relationship management, and data analytics. Marketing students at IE Business School in Spain, for example, earn a Salesforce certification before graduation.
But in October, Salesforce introduced Agent Force – a series of autonomous, customizable, AI-powered “agents” that perform specific tasks across various business departments. There’s an AI service agent, one for sales development, another for sales coaching and several others. Users, particularly those who learn how to use the AI tool effectively, can build custom agents to handle different jobs within their organization.
Employers are no longer just looking for graduates who can use Salesforce, they want graduates who know how to deploy these AI agents to enhance productivity and decision-making.
Similarly powerful and industry-specific AI tools are being rolled out in finance, supply chain management, healthcare, and industries at a pace nearly impossible to keep up with. It’s not only going to change how companies operate, but by necessity, how business schools train these workforces.
IE Business School pioneered online Master’s degrees in Europe 25 years ago, and in 2020 launched a Bachelor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. That was followed by an executive Management Program on Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
SHAPING AI-NATIVE LEADERS
IE University, recognized as one of the most innovative universities by international rankings, with Bachelor and Master students from 160 countries, decided early that it was all-in on AI. In 2023, it released its AI Manifesto, a commitment to integrate AI across all of its programs, from business and technology to law and design.
On February 18, the university announced a new collaboration with OpenAI, making it one of the first institutions to provide university-wide ChatGPT Edu to all of its 10,000 students from 160 countries, faculty, and staff across its six academic schools. OpenAI experts visited IE Tower, the university’s tech campus in Madrid, working with students and professors to promote the tools now at their disposal.
It’s part of a broader strategy to train AI-native leaders able to not just use AI but to lead in a world where AI is ubiquitous.
“In the same way employers say they want great soft skills – people who know how to work in teams, people who are good communicators, collaborative, but competitive at the same time – they’re now asking for AI productivity skills,” Lee Newman, Dean of IE Business School, tells Poets&Quants.
A FIRST MOVER
Lee Newman, dean of IE Business School in Spain
IE University was a first mover in AI and digital technology before releasing its manifesto and even before Chat GPT.
It pioneered online Master’s degrees in Europe 25 years ago, and in 2020 launched a Bachelor in Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence. That was followed by an executive Management Program on Data Analytics and Artificial Intelligence.
In its graduate portfolio, it has added specialized AI-focused programs such as the Master in Business Analytics and Big Data and the Master in Computer Science & Business Technology. Some 40% of graduates of these degrees are employed in the AI industry. Meanwhile, IE’s Talent & Careers team now works with companies and recruiters worldwide to determine the skills future employers will look for.
IE University Bachelor’s and Master’s students also take specialized AI courses – including AI for Productivity and AI 101 – to learn about ethical AI use and critical thinking. Each will receive an AI certification upon completion.
IE Business School is making AI core part of its curriculum. In the Master in Management program, students now take courses like Big Data and Machine Learning, Machine Learning in Business, and Chatbots, Robotics, and Intelligent Interfaces. The Master in Finance has added AI-focused content, including Deep Learning in Python, while the Master in Applied Economics now covers Machine Learning and Data Management.
“Like everybody, we recognized that this is a big deal. This is disruptive,” Newman says.
“Education is a sector that’s ripe for disruption. A lot of universities are very traditional and slow to adapt. Between either public funding or endowments, there hasn’t been a giant incentive to innovate business schools.
“One of the things we at IE University can take advantage of is our governance structure. We are agile; we can move fast. We knew early that we had to embrace AI.”
At the faculty level, IE has implemented AI training programs to help professors integrate generative AI into their teaching and research. In the classroom, this includes creating simulations and even virtual-reality enhanced experiences to immerse students in real-life scenarios that adapt to student input.
Finally, IE University is also making sure students think critically about AI’s social impact. By weaving AI into subjects like law, philosophy, and social sciences, the school wants students to develop a human-centered approach to technology. It’s not just about deploying AI-powered tools; it’s about understanding their ethical implications and real-world consequences.
Ikhlaq Sidhu, Dean of IE School of Science and Technology, with students from the IE Robotics Lab.
RETHINKING LEARNING FOR THE AI ERA
Two years after the introduction of ChatGPT to the world, schools are now grappling to balance the promise of AI with academic integrity. A wave of lawsuits has emerged, with several students suing schools after being accused of using AI to cheat on tests, projects, and essays. Just last month, an executive MBA student filed a federal lawsuit against Yale School of Management after his final exam was flagged because some of his answers were deemed too “long and elaborate” with “near perfect punctuation and grammar and elaborate formatting.” An undergraduate at Emory Goizueta Business School is suing after developing an AI study tool that won a Goizueta pitch competition.
As part of its 2023 AI manifesto, IE University crafted an academic integrity policy for AI use as part of a broader commitment to its ethical use. The university is also rethinking how it assesses learning.
Ikhlaq Sidhu, dean if IE University School of Science & Technology
For Ikhlaq Sidhu, Dean of IE School of Science and Technology, the focus should be on ensuring students use AI to enhance learning, not just to list AI skills on a resume.
“If everyone is going to be using AI in the workplace, then what sense does it make to stop people from using it in school? We cannot take the position that we leave teaching the way it is, and we ignore this big change happening in the world,” Sidhu tells P&Q.
“Just as there is already a digital divide between people who have access and people who don’t, I think there’s also a mindset divide in AI. Some students ride on top of AI, becoming more capable because they use the tool wisely. Others lean on it in the wrong way, don’t develop real skills, and they’re writing themselves off in the long run. Our job is to guide them toward the right mindset.”
At IE Business School, Newman expects to see more project-based and challenge-based learning, where students interact with scenarios posed by AI. The School is also rethinking traditional exams.
“We’d rather have live exams where students are being challenged by a bot in real-time,” Newman says. “So, you can’t find some online repository of test answers from the year before, because they will never have the same questions. It’s an interaction, and it will be different for everyone. The bot will go where the student goes.”
AI IN THE IMBA
IE Business School’s International MBA offers 11- and 15-month formats as well as a 19-month program where students earn a second master’s in fields such as science and technology, finance, economics, and marketing.
Students further customize their MBA with immersive five-week labs:
- Start-Up Lab: Students form teams to launch ventures, receiving mentorship and pitching ideas to investors.
- Tech Lab: Partners with IBM, Microsoft, and others to challenge students with real-world business problems.
- Business Impact Lab: Collaborates with global brands like McDonald’s, Heineken, Lego, Siemens, and Johnson & Johnson on corporate strategy.
- Social Impact Lab: Students act as consultants for NGOs, helping them define goals and expand impact.
Naturally, students are engaging with AI more and more in these labs, as well as in the business school’s three required accelerator modules: Career Discovery, Impact Skills, and Purpose Accelerator. As AI permeates more roles, functions, and sectors, the more students will be asked to engage with it.
PREPARING FOR THE NEW WORLD OF WORK
How does all this prepare IE University students for the new world of work? Bloomberg Intelligence has projected that Generative AI will create a $1.3 trillion market by 2032, very likely changing how business is done as well as the people – or bots – who do the work.
Think about the traditional corporate pyramid: You have a small group of leaders at the top, with progressively larger layers of employees as you go down.
“I think it’s relatively clear – but probably not everyone agrees – that that pyramid is going to become a diamond or some version of it,” Newman says.
“I worry about the jobs of technical doers, not just in tech, but across many fields. If I need a logo for a startup, for example, I no longer have to go to an agency. With AI, I can generate it myself, iterate on it, test it with people, refine it again, and continue until I get something I like. At that point, I can hand it off to a human for final touches, but even that finishing work is likely to be automated in the future.”
The biggest beneficiaries of AI in the near future will be managers, Newman believes. Until AI reaches true general intelligence, businesses still need people to organize and orchestrate work. It’s about human-machine synergy.
“The new entry-level role won’t just be a business analyst, it will be a junior orchestrator managing a team of both humans and AI agents,” Newman says. “Businesses will need professionals who understand how to assign the right tasks to the right people, or the right technology.
“Just like a good manager today knows which team members are best suited for certain tasks, the future manager will need to do the same with AI. That’s the world we’re preparing our students for.”
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