E-Paper
Why business schools must teach AI collaboration
This article is authored by Daviender Narang, director, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Ghaziabad.
A few months ago, business schools were still arguing about whether AI belonged in management education. That argument is settled. AI is already inside the workplace—shaping decisions, restructuring how teams operate, and redefining where organisations find value.
The question business schools need to answer now is more specific: are students learning how to work with AI, or are they just learning to operate it?
That difference matters more than most curricula currently reflect.
Plenty of institutions have moved quickly to add courses on prompt engineering, generative AI platforms, analytics software, and automation. These technical skills are valuable. But tools change fast. The AI application your students learn today may be largely irrelevant in three years. What holds its value is the ability to collaborate with AI—intelligently, ethically, and with strategic intent.
The debate over workplace AI is effectively over. Microsoft’s global survey found that 75% of knowledge workers have already brought the technology into their daily routines. For leadership, the expectation has fundamentally flipped: AI integration is no longer a competitive edge, but the bare minimum. The problem organisations keep running into is not that employees can’t use the tools—it’s that individual usage rarely translates into real business outcomes, because the skill of working with AI is different from the skill of operating it.
Business education has always aimed to prepare students for managerial realities. Those realities have shifted. Future managers will not just supervise people; they will coordinate work across human teams and AI systems, deciding what to automate, what demands human judgment, and where the two need to work in tandem.
That is why AI collaboration deserves more serious attention than AI tool proficiency.
Working well with AI requires a specific set of competencies. Students need to ask sharper questions, read AI-generated outputs critically, spot bias, verify claims, and reach decisions without simply deferring to whatever the machine produces. AI is a capable assistant. It is not an infallible one.
The human side of this equation matters just as much. The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report 2025 notes that employers still rank creative thinking, resilience, leadership, adaptability, and collaboration at the top of their hiring priorities—alongside technical capability. Close to 40% of skills required in current roles are projected to change by 2030. The professionals who hold ground are those whose human capabilities remain high, not just those who know the most tools.
Emerging research supports this. AI tends to complement human capability rather than displace it outright. Demand is growing for people who combine digital literacy with sound judgment, collaborative instincts, and the ability to navigate ethical grey areas—skills that technology cannot replicate on its own.
For business schools, this points toward a genuine shift in pedagogy—not just curriculum updates.
Students should move beyond generating content with AI. They should work through projects where AI assists with research, analysis, forecasting, and decisions—and then must account for those outputs. Classroom conversations should examine where AI recommendations hold up and where they break down. Case studies should get into the messier territory: Ethical dilemmas, governance challenges, the real risks of overdependence on automated systems.
Faculty have a role here too. When educators use AI as a genuine collaborative partner—not a shortcut—students develop a more grounded sense of what it is for. The goal is to enhance human intelligence, not to outsource thinking.
At Jaipuria Institute of Management, our view is that the professionals who will lead are those who combine technological capability with human judgment. The strongest managers of the next decade will not be defined by how many AI tools they can run. They will be defined by how well they work alongside AI while bringing empathy, ethical clarity, and strategic thinking to problems that machines cannot resolve alone.
Every major technological shift has changed the nature of work. AI is not an exception. What separates the leaders from the rest, historically, has never been access to the technology, it has been how well people learned to work with it.
Business schools carry a responsibility that extends beyond software training. We need to produce graduates who are thoughtful decision-makers—people who understand what AI can and cannot do, and who bring genuine judgment to the table. That is what future-ready actually means.
The future of management education is not about teaching students to compete against AI. It is about teaching them to work with it well.
(The views expressed are personal)
This article is authored by Daviender Narang, director, Jaipuria Institute of Management, Ghaziabad.
