AI is becoming a transformative force in the field of MBA education, with some business schools setting the pace more rapidly than others. During the “Business Casual” podcast, hosts Pola Lem, Maria Wich-Vila, and Caroline Diarte Edwards dive into the analysis of which schools are leading in AI adoption and what aspects aspiring MBA students should consider. Pola sets the stage by highlighting Stanford’s impressive array of 30 AI courses, underscoring its position at the forefront due to its tech-centric location and focus.

Maria emphasizes the significance of AI in shaping MBA programs, urging applicants to inquire about AI integration when choosing a business school. She notes that AI courses are not just technical; they also explore its implications in governance and societal impact, which are crucial for a holistic business education. Caroline finds the expansion of AI curricula exciting and sees it as a necessary evolution for business schools to address industry challenges and innovations.

For MBA aspirants, understanding how a business school incorporates AI into its courses could be a determining factor in their decision-making process. The hosts suggest prospective students should explore not just the availability of AI courses, but also how these programs equip them to thrive in a tech-driven business world. This episode is a reminder of the growing importance of AI literacy in business education, encouraging future leaders to consider how AI readiness plays into their career aspirations.

Episode Transcript

Note: This transcript was generated by AI and may contain minor inaccuracies.

[00:00:02] – Pola

Hello everyone, I’m Pola Lem with Poets and Quants. Welcome to our weekly podcast, Business Casual. I’m joined by my co-hosts Maria Wikvila and Caroline Diarte Edwards. Maria, as you know, is the founder of ApplicantLab, and Caroline was head of admissions at INSEAD and is co-founder of Fortuna Admissions. So, uh, Maria and Caroline have been kind enough today to record on a Friday to accommodate me. I I have been away for most of the week, which actually feels like decades, back from a whirlwind tour of Cambridge’s business school, followed by 2 days of conference at Oxford and some, some late dinners there, meeting people in the sector, which has been great. But actually, here’s something. In fact, I met one of our listeners. So I just wanted to say, Richard, if you’re on your drive back home hearing this, thank you for tuning in. And before we head into our discussion this week, I’m curious what you’ve gotten up to this week, Maria. And, uh, I hear there’s been a bit of AP prep again.

[00:01:14] – Maria

Yes, we are in the throes of AP season, and so we have been flashcarding away with like literally hundreds of flashcards. But, uh, my, my kid took the test a couple days ago. He’s feeling pretty good about it, so You know, regardless of the outcome, he put in a ton of effort these past few weeks to prepare. And so I’m just proud of how he, he locked in and, you know, really focused these past few weeks. So like I said to him, no matter what score you get, you’re gonna get a better score than you would’ve gotten a month ago. And that’s, I think, the most important part. So we shall see. But if anyone wants to know about Malthusian theory of population growth or the Hoyt-Sector model for urban development, uh, please don’t ask me because it has all left my brain at this point. I knew it 4 days ago.

[00:01:57] – Caroline

Pop quiz end.

[00:02:00] – Maria

Oh, no thank you. Oh, I have to suddenly go somewhere. Something is happening.

[00:02:06] – Pola

What about you, Caroline? Busy week? Yes.

[00:02:09] – Caroline

Um, well, so a fun event that actually I had at the weekend was, um, a get-together for the Stanford class of ’98, um, of which my husband is a part. And they had a reunion to celebrate the new scholarship holders for— and they have a scholarship that they donated for. So, there’s a Class of ’98 scholarship and they have two recipients every year. And so, one of the alumni hosted a very nice gathering in San Francisco to welcome the two recipients this year and to get the class together. So, that was really nice. And the two recipients, one is from Texas, he’s been working in nonprofit, and the other recipient is a guy from Kenya, um, really brilliant young people, and, um, just testament to the power of these scholarships and the financial aid to bring in very talented young people who otherwise wouldn’t have the opportunity to go to business school. So it was very inspiring.

[00:03:11] – Pola

Yeah, always good to hear a bit of good news. We actually heard a bit about during the conference about what business schools are doing to get students to apply from their immediate communities who may be disadvantaged. And it was actually quite heartening to hear that quite a few of them have those sorts of programs in place where they really kind of, you know, students whose families, no one may have gone to university before, and they’re really doing a little bit of first exposing them to the school and then also doing some handholding and teaching them how to then apply and, uh, and do a good job on your interview and, and prep. So anyway, that, that was a, a positive sort of takeaway. We need more of those these days. And so this week, actually, you, Caroline, have suggested our topic for discussion. So it’s based on a recent, uh, Poets Quants story about AI adoption at the top 10 business schools. And the top-line news is Stanford’s Business School is leading the way in those AI course offerings. Surprise, surprise. As no one will be struck to know, it makes a lot of sense given the fact that this school is really strong in this kind of cutting-edge tech stuff and situated right at the heart of the tech sector.

[00:04:29] – Pola

So, it’s got, I think, 30 AI courses spanning technical and non-technical areas, and that ranges from machine learning and finance, deep learning for business to things like AI policy and governance. There’s a course examining what AI means for human flourishing. And I should say, all this is based on an analysis published in April by GMAT Panda founder Graham O’Connor and the analysis catalogs 191 AI-related courses across programs in the US, Europe, and Asia. But that’s a brief intro from me. I’ll let Caroline tell us more. So Caroline, what appeals about this topic and this story?

[00:05:13] – Caroline

Well, I’m, I’m really interested to see what is happening at business schools. Obviously, this has been a huge challenge for the industry, for the schools to figure out how to integrate AI into the curriculum and what they should be offering. And it’s, it’s tricky, right? Because they’re basically building the plane while they’re in the air because everything is changing so rapidly and it’s emerged so quickly. So, um, it is a huge change management challenge for the schools. And given that things are changing so fast, and also students often, um, before they come into the business school, they have obviously already had experience with using AI tools and exposure to AI. So in many cases, the students may know more about AI than some of the faculty. So I, I think that it’s interesting also to read your article about Stanford and, um, the Stanford at GSB initiative there, which is student-driven. And I was in touch this week with some students at INSEAD, and they also talked about how some of the best initiatives at INSEAD have been student-driven as well. So that doesn’t surprise me. I, I expect that that’s happening at many schools where students are very excited about this.

[00:06:29] – Caroline

Obviously, they’re keen to learn as much as possible and to, and to share that with their peers. And so it makes sense that there’s a lot of there are clubs and activities and events that are student-driven as well as faculty-driven. And not surprising, of course, that Stanford has been leading the charge, given the location of the school in Silicon Valley and so many AI businesses coming out of this area. I do think that it’s a bit tricky to judge AI, the school’s AI offering, just by counting up the number of courses. Because there will be courses where AI is not in the title, but AI is in the content of the course, right? So I think that it’s difficult to judge this way. I think it would be perhaps more interesting to do a survey of students and learn about their experience and get some feedback from students on how well they think the school has been grappling with it and whether they’ve really been able to, to learn about these tools and how to leverage them effectively. So, in this article, it mentions that Harvard is near the bottom of the table with 5 courses, but I’m not sure that that necessarily says that you will get less exposure to AI and you’ll learn less at AI at HBS than at some of these other schools.

[00:07:51] – Caroline

For example, there’s a really interesting elective at HBS that I was reading about recently. So, it is run by See the lecturer at the school called Jeffrey Busgang, who’s also a venture capitalist and is investing specifically in AI initiatives. And he does an elective on, let me check the name of this program. So it’s Building in the Age of AI, and it is really giving students hands-on experience in how to build a startup leveraging AI. And from what I understand, his fund actually goes on to invest in some of these. The projects that come out of that class. So, I think that that’s a fascinating example of, of something that’s going on at HBS. And we have seen in the graduation statistics from 2025 that a higher proportion of the class at HBS is going into entrepreneurship. And we know that that is partly driven by AI. So clearly the students are getting to grips with this, even if they have lower number of courses with AI in the title than students at Stanford.

[00:08:56] – Maria

Hmm.

[00:08:57] – Pola

So Maria Caroline’s already raised some questions or poked some holes in the methodology here, including around the fact that Harvard is obviously low down on that list. But behind Stanford, which you’d expect at the top, we’ve got Darden and Wharton. So for whatever, whatever this is, this is worth, Darden’s got 25 courses using AI, according to the analysis. Wharton’s got 15, obviously both top schools. Is that what you’d expect for AI adoption, or at least as it’s measured here.

[00:09:33] – Maria

Yeah, I really, I appreciate what this person doing the study did. I think it’s a great place to start, and it’s certainly a topic that is very top of mind for a lot of students. But as Caroline brought up, just because a class doesn’t have AI in the title doesn’t necessarily mean that AI is not being used in many ways across the entire MBA curriculum. I toured UCLA’s Anderson Business School last year where they told us that they were using AI agents to teach people how to give difficult conversations or to have difficult conversations, to give critical feedback in a management class. I suspect that that course is not called AI for Managers. They’re just incorporating AI into the toolkit, similar to how, you know, a finance class might not be called Excel for Finance Managers, right? Excel is just something you use when you’re learning finance. I think AI is just going to be something you use as part of these broader topics. So I don’t know that this, this analysis may be the most in-depth one, but it’s certainly a great place to start. I also think it’s worth noting that a lot of schools, these top MBA programs, have started actually offering AI pathways.

[00:10:39] – Maria

So you can essentially major or do a concentration within a very logical sequence of AI-focused, you know, courses. And I think that AI is basically, you know, prior to AI, what a lot of these schools were offering was data analytics, right? The buzzword for many years was analytics and machine learning. And I think that a lot of these AI offerings may not necessarily be brand new offerings as they are more of an evolution, naturally so, of incorporating AI into existing, um, into some existing coursework. So again, I think this is a great start, but I also don’t think it tells the whole story necessarily. Hmm.

[00:11:19] – Pola

Yeah, Caroline, I’m curious If I’m a student who’s very interested in the AI offer and I really want to select my school based on that, how would I see through, if we’re looking at it somewhat cynically, AI washing and, and see really which schools are, are genuinely doing something very innovative and really incorporating a lot of AI?

[00:11:43] – Caroline

Well, I think it depends on what your specific interests are. Are you someone who is looking to start a company and start an AI-first a business, or are you someone who is into fintech and you want to learn how to leverage AI for that? So I think it really depends on what your specific interest and angle is. I think you could learn a lot from talking to the students. So it could certainly help to review the curriculum, right? You can look at the course offerings on the school websites. You can look at the core courses and the course descriptions. You can look at the elective offerings. So there is a lot of information that you could dig through on the school website. So I would definitely encourage encourage students to, uh, candidates to do that, but also to connect with students and hear from them directly about their experiences. And especially if you can connect with somebody who has a common interest with you. One way of doing that could be, for example, to look at if there’s a student club that corresponds to your interest. So if you are interested in fintech, there may well be a fintech club that you could connect with, and then you could find out more about what they’re doing, how they found the AI integration, and whether they think the school has embraced this effectively.

[00:12:58] – Caroline

So I think that that’s probably the best way of learning about whether schools are going to be able to enable you to learn what you need to learn. And I would also say speak to a few students. So I checked in this week with a couple of current students at INSEAD to get their perspective on how the school has adapted to AI. And funnily enough, one of them thought it was great and one of them thought it wasn’t great. So just very different experiences. And it may be that one of the students just came to the school with already a much higher level of sophistication around AI than the other student, and so had higher expectations. But they had very different perspectives on how well they thought the school had done. One of them thought that the school had been very savvy and practical and had done a really good job of integrating AI tools into both core courses and electives. And she also commented about how career services had workshops for students on how to effectively leverage AI tools in your researching, in preparing your job search, preparing your networking, and so on. So, it’s not just in the curriculum, it’s also in career service coaching.

[00:14:09] – Caroline

And then the other student felt that the AI aspects of the courses felt bolted on and didn’t actually add a huge amount to his learning experience. So, completely different perspectives. You’re going to get that with such a diverse class of people who have such different backgrounds and different levels of knowledge before they come to the program.

[00:14:33] – Maria

Hmm.

[00:14:33] – Pola

Yeah, I mean, Maria, are you finding at all in your talks with students that AI is much of a factor these days in that kind of decision? I mean, I assume it would be well down the list behind other things like main interests and location.

[00:14:50] – Maria

Yeah, I, I don’t think that it is a driving force in somebody choosing a program because first of all, if you really want to learn the real nitty-gritty of AI, then apply for a master’s in AI, right? Like you’re not, you’re applying to the wrong type of program. If you’re applying to an MBA program, it’s because you wanna learn about business and management. And of course AI is an increasingly important part of that. But I also, I continue to think that AI is a tool much like Microsoft Excel or HTML, right? 20 years ago when the internet and webpages started, there was this rush for people to learn HTML so that you could build something called a home page. Uh, and I, I think it would be really sad if someone attended an MBA program at that time and they wasted an elective instead of learning general strategy or marketing techniques that they can take with them that are essentially very timeless, uh, at the end of the day, because human nature is changing, but human nature is still pretty timeless. And so to the, to the extent that a lot of these courses look at what is human nature and then how do we leverage human nature to sell to people or to manage them, etc.

[00:15:55] – Maria

You know, it’s just a tool. And I would be very sad if someone 20 years ago would have said, oh my gosh, it’s the HTML revolution. I’m going to use up 4 of my precious electives in business school to learn how to build something called a home page. And now, 20 years later, that is completely not— not irrelevant, but it certainly is not as relevant as it was back then. So I would caution anyone Look, if you need to really double down on a course or two to learn the tools and to get into the zeitgeist, and especially if you are looking to build a business right away using AI, then of course that makes sense. But I do think that there is— there are other ways to get that information right. You can always self-teach. I mean, the nice thing about AI is that AI can teach you how to use itself. And so you can always teach yourself, I think, a lot of these principles. So Personally, I would advise people to focus on the core elements of that general management, uh, perspective. And if that’s what you’re— that, that is what I believe you should be getting the MBA for, uh, in the first place.

[00:16:56] – Maria

So I would, uh, I don’t know. I, I don’t know that I would rush all in and suddenly do all of my electives, um, in just that one topic.

[00:17:06] – Pola

And I mean, you’ve alluded to the fact that, uh, there’s maybe a couple of different approaches at least. I mean, some schools are sticking these AI teaching and learning into electives, whereas others are kind of embedding it throughout the whole of what they’re doing. And then obviously there’s a mix of those two things. One of the more striking structural findings of this analysis was that the vast majority of the courses, I think, over 150 out of 166 were electives, and only 9 of those sat in the required core. What do you make of that, Caroline?

[00:17:49] – Caroline

Well, I think it’s going back to Maria’s point that marketing is still marketing, accounting is still accounting. You may use different tools, and that’s certainly the case. That’s also the feedback that I got from the students at INSEAD, that AI had been woven into a lot of those core courses so that they were using AI tools in a way that obviously wouldn’t have done 5 or 6 years ago. So, I can remember a long time ago when there was the dot-com boom, and that was before I went to business school, but I can remember some colleagues who had come back from business school who were concerned that everything that they had learned at business school was no longer relevant because the rules had changed, right? And then we had the dot-com bust and we discovered actually the rules hadn’t changed, that you actually still did the fundamentals of finance and the fact that you had to build a profitable business, um, still, um, was still valid. And so even though there was some concern that everything had changed and what they had learned was maybe no longer relevant. I think that that dot-com bust proved that that was not the case.

[00:19:01] – Caroline

And so, I think that a lot of what you will learn in the core courses will continue to be critical, a critical foundation for your business career, whether or not you’re using AI tools. So, I don’t think students should, or candidates should panic too much about whether they are going into a program that has 20 AI electives and one core course that has AI in the title versus a program that has, you know, integrated it differently. I think you’re going to get exposure at all of these schools, and it will be a mix of what you’re learning in the classroom and what you’re learning through the student clubs and student-driven initiatives. And I think, you know, that’s how it should be.

[00:19:48] – Pola

Hmm. Yeah, we’ve, we’ve talked about students, uh, quite a bit, but I mean, it’s, it’s interesting that analysis also flags how schools are handling the student use of AI tools. So interestingly, no program in that study has a blanket ban, and most of these business schools are requiring disclosure or citation when AI informs submitted student work, and then several of them, including MIT Sloan, Stanford, explicitly encourage AI use in coursework, but leave the restrictions up to individual instructors. Maria, is that a fairly good indicator of how you think things will develop in the next few years in terms of creating guidelines and rules around AI?

[00:20:37] – Maria

Yeah, I mean, if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em. I think secretly I, I would think that a lot of people who are in the teaching profession would prefer that no AI is being used, because I do think that it becomes very quickly a crutch, and sometimes it’s an inaccurate crutch. So it’s a crutch that saves us from having to do a lot of thinking ourselves, and then it walks us off a cliff when it’s not right. So I, you know, but I also think that the schools realize that this is the future. And like I said a second ago, if you can’t beat them, join them. So you might as well get get these students ready using these tools, but also doing it in a thoughtful way where it doesn’t replace your brain, where it might augment your brain, but it doesn’t replace your brain. Uh, yeah, and I think it’s just going to continue to evolve. But if people are using AI in the workplace, then people are going to have to be using it also in the MBA program. So watch this space, it’s just going to keep growing from here, I suspect.

[00:21:33] – Pola

Hmm, you’re reminding me actually of a chat I had at Cambridge with one of the professors there who, he’s, I think, head of their AI program or contributes a lot to how they develop AI in the classroom. And he was saying that in the student work that he grades, the level has gone from here to here. So it’s, you know, there’s an expectation now that you’re not just writing a brilliant 2,000-word essay. You’re doing that, but also you’re bringing in interviews and research and you’re, and all sorts of data, and then you’re also, you know, bringing in a presentation, and it’s like the previous kind of bar has obviously been raised by quite a bit. And in a way, he said, that’s actually quite exciting because students, a lot of the students are doing a really great job of fortifying what they used to do with even more information and really making this work in the way that you would hope for.

[00:22:39] – Maria

So can I just say something real quick? I am a little bit concerned about the short-term implication. So in the short term, yes, my paper before, it would have been 3 pages long and maybe it would have been a little sloppy, and now I’m, I’m presenting this 15-page beautifully formatted, uh, piece of work as my project. But am I actually sustaining that knowledge afterwards? Like, am I, am I doing enough of the work where in my own brain, my own cognitive skills have been strengthened. I attended a webinar a week or two ago from this woman named Vivienne Ming, who recently published a book about how to basically try to future-proof our brains from AI. And she cited this really interesting article about radiologists and how if a radiologist uses AI, the radiologist plus AI together, yes, they are better. But if a radiologist uses AI a lot and then you pull the AI away, that radiologist’s actually— their accuracy goes down. After they don’t have the AI tool anymore. So that would indicate that, again, if we understandably, being human, if we rely on this crutch too much, we do start to atrophy our own brains.

[00:23:45] – Maria

So I would caution anyone in any context to be a little bit concerned about like, wow, this output that I’ve generated is so amazing. But at the end of the day, am I as a person, is my own intellectual cognitive ability, has that been strengthened? So, I would, you know, just a little, I don’t know, I won’t step down off of my virtual soapbox, but, and I’m guilty of this too. Like, sometimes when I use AI, I use it as a shortcut and it either lies to me with a smile or I find myself sort of getting a little bit lazy and trying to kind of force myself to not have to use it. It reminds me of that movie WALL-E where all the humans on the spaceship are just kind of floating around on these, you know, floating sofas or lounge chairs, I should say, that are— they don’t have to do anything. And because they don’t have to do anything, they’ve atrophied. So I don’t know, that’s my own little— I might be screaming into the void though, and I might be on the losing end of things here.

[00:24:50] – Pola

But agree, though, having said that, my aim this weekend is absolutely to float around on a floating sofa.

[00:24:57] – Maria

So Yes, amen to that.

[00:25:01] – Pola

So I think we can all go do that, at least for a little bit. And a quick final question to you both, which is, as it’s Friday, Caroline, what are you most looking forward to this weekend?

[00:25:14] – Caroline

Well, it’s Mother’s Day on Sunday, and I’m taking it as an excuse to inflict a very long hike on my family. So we’re going to head up to Point Reyes, which is north of San Francisco, and there’s a lovely hike there out to Tavales Point. Which has absolutely gorgeous wildflowers at this time of year. So we’ll take a picnic and do about an 8 or 9-mile hike out there.

[00:25:37] – Pola

That sounds great. Maria?

[00:25:40] – Maria

For me, I shall also be hiking. I will be hiking to a restaurant down the street from Mimosa, probably. That’s gonna be about the extent of my Mother’s Day.

[00:25:51] – Pola

All right. Well, I think with that, we’re done for today. But please come back next week if you like the discussion today, and do check out poetsandquants.com and listen to the latest episode of Business Casual. So thanks very much again to my co-hosts, Maria and Caroline, and thank you everyone for listening.