Dan Richards is a serial founder and former public company CEO, and an award-winning member of the marketing faculty at the Rotman School of Management, where he oversees the credit course associated with MBA student internships.<\/p>\n
From medicine to law, artificial intelligence is reshaping professions whose core practices were settled. My role teaching business school students is no exception. <\/p>\n
Arguably, teaching in many university classrooms has only modestly changed since the founding of Oxford in 1096: an instructor at the front talking, students listening and taking notes. <\/p>\n
Today, AI has fundamentally altered the rules of the game on everything from classroom dynamics to assignments and exams. <\/p>\n
Consider a few now-familiar scenarios: <\/p>\n
Give marks for class participation \u2026 and when you ask a question hands shoot up. That\u2019s not always because students have done the work and know the answer, but because some have typed your query into an AI chatbot. When you call on them, they say the answer from their AI platform.<\/p>\n
Assign a five-page article where there will be a quiz in the next class \u2026 and many students will rely on AI to distill those five pages to five bullet points. <\/p>\n
Schedule a group project \u2026 and expect presentations that are edited and sometimes largely constructed by AI. <\/p>\n
Faced with this reality, instructors have two choices. One is to design courses and assessments to restrict AI use. The other is to accept that AI is here to stay and incorporate it directly into how we teach, the route that Rotman\u2019s faculty are encouraged to pursue. As I\u2019ve integrated AI into my courses, three lessons have emerged.<\/p>\n
AI is both inevitable and invaluable <\/p>\n
\u201cThis is amazing!\u201d<\/p>\n
That\u2019s a common reaction when I show senior executives in my network a customer persona I built, allowing students to role-play sales conversations in real time. What surprises them is not just the sophistication of the tool, but that without any technical background it took me 90 minutes to build.<\/p>\n
In another course, students work with companies to deploy AI to solve practical business problems. For many, it\u2019s the first time they\u2019ve used AI to build something tangible. At the end of the term, students consistently say that while the course content was valuable, their deepest learning came from employing AI to address a real-world challenge.<\/p>\n
My takeaway: Used well, artificial intelligence doesn\u2019t replace learning. Rather AI accelerates it.<\/p>\n
AI is improving quickly<\/p>\n
In one of my courses, AI has gone from back of the pack to ranking among the leaders.<\/p>\n
That course on Effective Communication is one that I teach to both MBA and undergraduate students. Each week there\u2019s a written exercise where students draft an email response to a real-life scenario. When I gave these scenarios to ChatGPT three years ago, what I got back was underwhelming \u2013 flowery, verbose, overly formal. When I showed this to students the most common reaction was laughter. <\/p>\n
Fast forward to today and the responses to the same scenarios are indescribably better. While AI still struggles in some cases, on balance it now matches – and sometimes exceeds \u2013 the average student submission. Meanwhile, the gap between AI and the best student responses has dramatically narrowed. <\/p>\n
The culmination of this writing exercise: Each week students vote on the top three responses from a pool of 10 \u2013 nine written by classmates and one generated by AI. Over 60 classes in the past three years, the AI submission has never ranked first. Last fall, though, for the first time it placed second, twice. Given the pace of improvement, I fully expect that at some point this year, the AI response will top the list.<\/p>\n
My Takeaway: Even where AI still lags, it\u2019s moving quickly to close the gap. <\/p>\n
We work best in concert with AI <\/p>\n
Wharton\u2019s Ethan Mollick is among the leading thinkers in how AI can be deployed for everyday use. In his book Co-Intelligence: Living and Working with AI, he makes the case that AI should be harnessed to work collaboratively. <\/p>\n
That\u2019s exactly what I\u2019ve seen. I spend a great deal of time helping students improve their writing, both inside and outside of class. Whether it be for a course assignment, a thank you note after a networking conversation or a cover letter for a job application, there\u2019s a simple three-step path that consistently produces the best outcome. <\/p>\n
First, students prepare a draft in their own words. <\/p>\n
Next, they ask an AI tool to improve that draft.<\/p>\n
Finally, they compare the two versions side by side and merge them, selecting the strongest elements of each. <\/p>\n
My Takeaway: Working in tandem preserves the student\u2019s voice while adding structure and polish. In my experience, the combined output is without exception better than either version alone.<\/p>\n
The obligation to adapt <\/p>\n
Given the scale of investment and momentum behind artificial intelligence, its impact on how we\u2019ll work is no longer in question. That creates a responsibility for business schools – and universities more broadly – to prepare students for this reality.<\/p>\n
The choice is clear. We can hope AI is a passing threat and design courses to limit its use or we can embrace AI and teach students how to use it thoughtfully, ethically and effectively. One approach prepares students for yesterday\u2019s world, the other positions them for the one they\u2019re about to enter.<\/p>\n
This column is part of Globe Careers\u2019 Leadership Lab series, where executives and experts share their views and advice about the world of work. Find all Leadership Lab stories at tgam.ca\/leadershiplab and guidelines for how to contribute to the column <\/a>here<\/a>. <\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Dan Richards is a serial founder and former public company CEO, and an award-winning member of the marketing…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":439079,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[20],"tags":[62,276,277,49,48,2922,4081,61],"class_list":{"0":"post-439078","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-artificial-intelligence","8":"tag-ai","9":"tag-artificial-intelligence","10":"tag-artificialintelligence","11":"tag-ca","12":"tag-canada","13":"tag-noastack","14":"tag-ordid20000","15":"tag-technology"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439078","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=439078"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/439078\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/439079"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=439078"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=439078"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=439078"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}