Ayushman Dey, MBA 26, speaking at the first vibe coding workshop a year ago at Haas. The event was a joint effort of the student-run Haas AI Club with the Haas Product Management Club, the Haas Technology Club, and the Berkeley Entrepreneurs Association.
When Ayushman Dey, MBA 26, scanned the room during the first vibe coding workshop at UC Berkeley Haas last year he realized that something remarkable was underway.
About 100 students were building personal websites using apps like Lovable and Windsurf, embedding Perplexity’s Sonar API to create personalized news apps, and creating prototypes with Anthropic’s newly released Claude Code.
“We got a huge response, so many people wanted to learn,” said Dey, former vice president of strategy & innovation of the student-run Haas AI Club, who will join Snowflake, an AI data cloud company, after he graduates. “There’s a huge demand for this skill set because increasingly for startups in the Bay Area as well as large enterprises, it’s non-negotiable to have these skills. If you don’t, you’re just not going to get the job.”
In the year since that first session, the pace has only picked up. At the center of one of the most consequential technological shifts in history, Haas’ proximity to the AI boom has enabled countless opportunities for students.
More than 100 students showed up to vibe code last year at Haas, kicking off a campuswide movement.
On any given day, A-list execs from companies including OpenAI, Anthropic, Perplexity, Google, Meta, Apple, Nvidia, and AMD are visiting campus to speak at classes, attend hackathons, and volunteer as mentors. These execs contribute in many ways—from providing industry insights to giving quick feedback on a startup idea, to providing practical tips for landing a job at in a particular AI role.
“At Berkeley, you just happen to meet so many incredible people,” Dey said. “I would not have been able to get this momentum that I have today without that.”
Many students—from those with a tech background to newbies who are AI shy— are building apps and startups quicker than ever before in classes like Lean LaunchPad and AI for Entrepreneurship, a new elective launched this past spring that enrolled 57 full-time and evening & weekend MBA students. There’s also Berkeley STeP, a 10-week startup incubator, the UC LAUNCH accelerator, and Berkeley SkyDeck. Current MBA students are also among the first to work toward the AI for Business graduate certificate, which requires taking classes on topics ranging from data mining and analytics to the use of AI in entrepreneurship, healthcare, new product development, and climate investing
“If any business school can be relevant, it’s Haas because we are at the center of so much that’s happening right now,” said Devansh Shah, MBA 27, who is co-president of the Haas AI Club and the graduate student instructor (GSI) for the AI and Entrepreneurship class.
AI and Entrepreneurship is a new elective that launched this spring, enrolling 57 full-time and evening & weekend MBA students. It’s a structured startup accelerator program. Photo: Noah Berger
Shah pointed to the influence of the Berkeley AI Research Lab and a bounty of other resources across campus. “Berkeley is the epicenter for everything that’s happening in AI safety from a technical, policy, and business standpoint,” he said. “It’s the epicenter for physical AI and biotech startups.”
More than 700 UC Berkeley founders have billions since the AI revolution started a couple years ago, he added. As these companies mature, Haas students will have a new wave of opportunities.
Kelly Ochoa, director of the StEP program, said the 18 startup teams in the current StEP cohort used AI to build demos faster than ever, speeding through the process of validating their startup ideas. “The conversation now is about adapting our methods to this new reality, while doubling down on what matters most: validating real markets, deeply understanding customers, and ensuring what we build is truly human-centered and something people actually want,” Ochoa said.
AI encouragement for all
L-R: Katrina Keating, MBA 26, Colton Hess, MBA/MPH 26, Chris Arreola, MBA 27, Travis Fraser, MBA 27, and Samantha Yen, MBA 26. Hess offers one-on-one AI activation sessions with classmates. Photo: Brittany Hosea-Small.
In this new world, many students are going beyond themselves to teach each other. Colton Hess, MBA/MPH 26, who spent last summer working on his AI-powered sleep optimizing startup Rhymicly at SkyDeck, set a personal goal to help make sure that everyone in the 2026 MBA cohort was empowered to build using Claude Code by graduation.
“I’ve felt more and more compelled to bring other people into this,” Hess said. “AI makes you think about what you can do in the world—like ‘I can build a startup. I can change the world.’ That’s why I tell all of my MBA classmates about it.”
Colton Hess, MBA 26, wants every 2026 MBA grad to be empowered to use Claude Code.
Since January, Hess has scheduled more than 30-hour-long “activation” sessions to jumpstart MBA students’ AI-fueled projects. A friendly nudge is usually all it takes to get students up and running with Claude Code, he said. Hess builds personalized playbooks for everyone he works with to guide them on how to use Claude Code for their projects.
Effie Angus, MBA/MCS 26, always wanted to help farming nonprofit FARMpreneurs organize its finances. After a session with Hess, she quickly built a system that combined cash flow data with spending, giving the organization a bigger-picture view. Angus was hooked.
“What surprised me is how reliant I am on Claude now,” said Angus, who is now using Claude to help complete her MBA capstone project. “I definitely feel way more comfortable using it.”
Katrina Keating, MBA 26, and Sarah Devermann, MBA 26, built website prototypes in an hour during a session with Hess. Keating’s site will guide visitors, including her classmates, to hidden gems in San Francisco neighborhoods. Devermann turned a PowerPoint presentation into the first version of a website for a startup, which is focused on health and longevity.
“We came into the session with Colton with rough ideas of what we might want to build, feeling unsure if we could,” Keating said. “Getting encouragement from Colton and Sarah and seeing our ideas become reality was just what I needed to stop hesitating and just dive in.”
Keating, who will head to McKinsey in a consultant role after she graduates in May, is now a member of the WhatsApp group that the AI Club launched for Haas students.
Coming together to build skills
More than 200 Haas students have formed a community on WhatsApp, according to Gonzalo Vásquez, MBA 26, who started the group last year as co-president of the Haas Technology Club. The group is active daily, with classmates shipping side projects, sharing Claude/Cursor workflows, and debugging together, he said. Because GPT and Claude models are updated every few weeks, people are testing them and sharing the performance between versions to choose what better fits their needs, he said.
Gonzalo Vásquez, MBA 26, (left) interviewed Perplexity CEO Aravind Srinivas with classmate Rey Yruegas, MBA 26, at the Dean’s Speaker Series last October. Both are very active in the AI community at Haas.
Vásquez pointed to classmates working on other AI projects that are solving pain points. Rey Yruegas, MBA 26, built an MBA class-trading swap system during an intensive AI product management course. Half of the MBA class used the swap system for this semester’s enrollment. Kevin Astuhuaman, MBA 26, created Trackly, a job scraping tool designed to give applicants a first-mover advantag. He started building the app in his AI for Entrepreneurship class.
Meanwhile, Pepe Alonso, MBA 27, tapped his deep knowledge in AI to teach a series of popular workshops in April called From Zero to AI Agents. The workshop, which focused on building, implementing, and technically evaluating AI systems, addressed the need for the more technical skills that MBA students will need to get jobs. Alonso cited a 2025 GMAC Corporate Recruiters Survey that found 31% of global recruiters and hiring managers now prioritize AI fluency when hiring b-school grads.
For the syllabus, Alonso boiled down all that he’d learned about AI as an undergraduate engineering major and a master’s student in artificial intelligence—and during his time at four startups. He covers software, AI, LLMs, and agent architecture. “The workshop isn’t just for entrepreneurs,” he said. “Students are now expected to be ‘AI intrapreneurs’ at the companies they join.”
After word got out about the first session, attendance doubled to about 80 students.
Students who took the workshop said Alonso made complex concepts easy to grasp. One student said she was “truly blown away by what I learned in a single class with you.” Alonso plans to teach the class as a student-led DeCal in the fall.
Pepe Alonso, MBA 27, taught the From Zero to AI Agents workshop in April.
As many MBA students continue to expand their use of AI tools, many will also be pondering the future of AI and its impact on the workplace and the world.
“I share a lot of concern about the potential negative impacts,” Hess said. “But I am an optimist and find the tech incredibly democratizing in helping the traditional gates of entrepreneurship to come down. I am also an advocate for people feeling empowered to use technology to scale their impact in the world and help shape the world for the better.”