The new business curriculAI

Welcome to the age of h(AI)gher education. With up to 70% of all skills utilized in jobs today set to change by 2030, according to Linkedin’s 2025 Work Change Report (pdf) because of AI advancements, many employees are at risk of redundancy — they can either adapt, or fall behind. As many begin familiarizing themselves with AI tools in an attempt to hold steady onto a constantly shifting career ladder swayed by the winds of AI advancement, business schools all around the world are taking note, integrating AI into their curricula, according to the Financial Times.

Approximately 80% of business schools surveyed globally had integrated AI into their teaching by 4Q 2024 in some form or another, FT reported, citing a recent report (pdf) by the Graduate Management Admission Council (GMAC). The annual report — covering 300 business schools across 40 countries, and focused on the latest trends impacting graduate programs — also notes that up to 40% of prospective business students say AI is essential to their ideal curriculum. And they seem to be on the right track, seeing as the ability to leverage AI appears to be among the top three skills that will grow more important over the next five years, according to GMAC survey of corporate recruiters (pdf).

So how exactly is AI being integrated into business curricula? The most popular form of AI integration was the exploration of its role in society and business ethics, with a narrow majority of 44%. This is followed by courses that focus on the use of AI in business decision-making processes at 43%, integrating AI in hands-on experiences such as business simulations at 42%, with training in prompt-writing and utilizing AI in day-to-day tasks — perhaps surprisingly — being the least popular method in which AI has been integrated, at a relatively low 23%.

It’s not just about the tools. As noted by the survey, the programs in which AI is integrated seem to focus less on mastering AI tools or delegating tasks to AI, and more on navigating its uses. FT writes that these programs seem to be designed to “produce strategically fluent leaders,” and “[combine] digital fluency with a human-centric perspective,” quoting academic professionals from business schools across the world.

These schools are on the right track. FT’s interviewees all reached a general consensus — the role of education now and in the future is to set up young professionals with the ability to work hand-in-hand with artificial intelligence, rather than blindly delegate and offload. This is in line with figures published in the World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs 2025 report (pdf), which estimated that — globally — one third of all tasks will be performed by technology, and one third by human-machine collaboration by 2030.