When Clinical Professor of Economics Thomas Walker worked in industry just three years ago, AI was barely a topic of conversation.
Today, discussions about AI are everywhere. Businesses are incorporating AI into their offerings and their workflows. Entry-level analyst positions, once a mainstay for fresh business school grads, are at risk.
At the same time, uncertainty abounds. How much of the conversation around AI is signal and how much is noise? If this much has changed in less time than it takes to finish a bachelor’s degree, what might the world look like three years from now?
“Trying to stay in touch with something that’s changing so fast is a tricky thing to do,” said Walker. “But we’re focused on building a framework that helps students adapt and apply what they learn as the technology evolves — that helps them be resilient no matter what comes next.”
In a changing world, AI helps meet students where they’re at
As AI became a household term, work was already underway to reimagine DePaul’s MBA program. Aligning the program with the cutting edge in industry was one guiding precept; each core class now includes a hands-on project in partnership with a real-world company or nonprofit.
Aligning the program with the expectations of today’s students was another.
Some students arrive straight from undergrad; others, after several years in the workforce. Many are career switchers.
Incorporating AI makes it possible to tailor a business education to students’ increasingly varied experience levels and interests.
Walker teaches a foundational course in business analytics tools. The concepts he teaches can be abstract, but AI helps students connect these concepts to specific use cases.
Professor of Economics Rafael Tenorio does something similar in his Strategic Management Foundations class, another core course in the MBA program. When he teaches different business models, he tasks students with using AI to find real-world examples of those models.
“It empowers the students to participate,” he said. “It helps me illustrate the concept; it fills in gaps.”
Program pairs new skills with time-tested fundamentals
Like many of the core courses in DePaul’s MBA, the version of Walker’s business analytics tools class that he’s teaching this quarter is new. AI wasn’t the reason for curricular changes across the MBA. But it has shifted Walker’s thinking about what business education looks like in 2025, and how to deliver it.
A previous version of the class centered on three exams that Walker used to break down tricky, technical skills. Now, like other core courses across the MBA, the class is project-based. The emphasis isn’t just on practicing skills in isolation. Instead, it’s on understanding how to apply skills in complicated, real-world contexts.
“The more I think about AI, the more I think of it as a framework for discovery — for trying to answer big questions,” Walker said. “We really try to belabor the point that step number one of business analytics isn’t learning some program or software. It’s asking the right questions. It’s knowing where to start.”
For Tenorio, like Walker, grappling with AI has led him to return to the fundamentals — in Tenorio’s case, of the discipline of economics itself.
“What I want is for students to treat AI as a complement, not a substitute,” Tenorio said. “It can do boilerplate research for you in a fraction of a second. It can remind you of the fundamental things you should consider when trying to solve a strategic problem. But you don’t get brilliant, quirky solutions with AI. We still need to augment it with human insight.”
Experiences offer insights for future-proofing education and industry alike
How do you future-proof a business education, whether you’re in academia or industry? How do you brace for further changes in an already-changing world?
Tenorio’s and Walker’s experiences with reenvisioning the MBA classroom in the age of AI suggest that it goes something like this: You leverage new tools, whatever they are, to expand the range of material that is available to you. You focus on equipping students with frameworks that help them adapt to – or even get ahead of – change, whether that’s today’s new tools or innovations we can’t yet picture.
“That looks like working together on teams, asking good questions, finding the real problem that a business has — even finding problems they don’t know they had,” Walker said. “It looks like pushing the boundaries, moving the company forward, and setting better goals and objectives. Our MBA students get hands-on experience using AI to do just that. And our program is designed to continue doing that, even as technology evolves.”