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IESE\u2019s Barcelona campus, where a faculty hackathon last fall drew 85 of the school\u2019s 120 full-time professors to work on AI integration across the MBA curriculum<\/p>\n
For years, business schools have responded to artificial intelligence the same way: launch a new elective, add an analytics track, create a concentration, maybe ink a partnership with a tech company for certifications.<\/p>\n
At IESE Business School<\/a> at the university of Navarra in Barcelona, Spain, one of Europe\u2019s premier business schools<\/a>, that approach no longer fit the scale of what\u2019s coming.<\/p>\n Starting in September 2026, IESE will roll out a comprehensive redesign of its full-time MBA, embedding AI throughout every first-year course and reshaping the program around what school leaders describe as the central managerial challenge of the next decade: learning to lead organizations where humans and AI systems work side by side.<\/p>\n \u201cWe made a deliberate choice not to bolt AI onto a couple of electives and call it a transformation,\u201d says Marc Badia, IESE\u2019s deputy dean. \u201cAI now runs through every first-year course, because in two years our graduates will be in roles where the question is not \u2018Can you use AI?\u2019 but \u2018Can you lead and manage in a human-plus-AI organization?’\u201d<\/p>\n IESE\u2019s Marc Badia: \u201cHow do you reskill people when you are changing not just their job, but their professional identity?\u201d<\/p>\n FROM \u2018FRAGMENTED\u2019 AI EFFORTS TO A FULL REDESIGN<\/p>\n The redesign is among the most ambitious MBA overhauls announced in response to generative AI. But IESE leaders say it didn\u2019t emerge from ChatGPT panic or competitive pressure. They describe it instead as the culmination of years of faculty development, internal experimentation, and increasingly urgent conversations about how AI is changing not just business, but the nature of managerial work itself.<\/p>\n Badia traces the school\u2019s AI push to 2019, when IESE launched its AI and the Future of Management Initiative and introduced a course called AI for Executives that has since become one of its best sellers.<\/p>\n By the time generative AI exploded into public view in late 2022, the school already had a cohort of faculty working across multiple AI-related projects. IESE then accelerated development, bringing in outside thinkers including Wharton professor Ethan Mollick, running faculty seminars, and launching large-scale internal experimentation.<\/p>\n \u201cOne of the things that, to me, is remarkable is how all the faculty understood that this is serious, it\u2019s different, and no one can miss this train,\u201d Badia says.<\/p>\n EVERYONE WHO COULD BE THERE WAS THERE<\/p>\n That urgency culminated in a faculty hackathon last fall that drew roughly 85 of the school\u2019s 120 full-time professors.<\/p>\n \u201cEveryone who could be there was there,\u201d Badia says.<\/p>\n The result was less a single initiative than what IESE Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Innovation Evgeny K\u00e1ganer describes as the convergence of many previously disconnected efforts.<\/p>\n \u201cWe had a number of somewhat fragmented things that we had been working on,\u201d K\u00e1ganer says. \u201cFaculty innovation, learning innovation, understanding the impact of AI on business and education. We were looking for something that would bring it all together and really engage the entire school.\u201d<\/p>\n WHY EDUCATION IS ESPECIALLY EXPOSED<\/p>\n Historically, he says, IESE had been cautious about major curricular changes, typically testing new approaches in smaller or more peripheral programs before pushing them into the flagship MBA.<\/p>\n \u201cThis time felt different,\u201d K\u00e1ganer says.<\/p>\n Part of that urgency stems from K\u00e1ganer\u2019s view that education is among the industries most profoundly disrupted by AI \u2013 because the technology strikes at both the product and the process at once.<\/p>\n \u201cIt affects your core value offering because the competencies students need are changing fast,\u201d he says. \u201cAnd at the same time, your core operating model \u2013 how we actually facilitate learning \u2013 is also being changed.\u201d<\/p>\n THREE LAYERS OF AI COMPETENCY<\/p>\n That dual disruption is why IESE chose not merely to add AI content but to rethink the architecture of the MBA itself.<\/p>\n The redesign is built around three progressively developed competency areas: personal AI fluency, or the ability to work effectively with AI tools and systems; AI-enabled workflow and operating model redesign; and strategic AI acumen, including business model transformation and system-level decision-making.<\/p>\n K\u00e1ganer argues that most organizations have already moved past simple task automation and are now wrestling with much larger questions about how entire workflows should be rebuilt around AI.<\/p>\n \u201cWe\u2019re going back almost 30 years to business process reengineering,\u201d he says. \u201cStudents need to understand current workflows, understand what different forms of AI can do, and then think about what the future architecture of those workflows should look like.\u201d<\/p>\n IESE MBA student in campus Barcelona<\/p>\n THE HARDEST QUESTION IN THE ROOM<\/p>\n That means grappling with questions companies themselves haven\u2019t answered: Which tasks belong to humans? Which to AI? Where do the handoffs happen? What risks emerge? And perhaps most difficult: how do leaders persuade employees to embrace systems that may ultimately replace parts of their own jobs?<\/p>\n \u201cYou have to engage humans to start doing things differently,\u201d K\u00e1ganer says. \u201cBut those same humans understand that some of these systems may eventually replace them.\u201d<\/p>\n The uncertainty surrounding those questions, Badia says, is already showing up in MBA enrollment trends.<\/p>\n \u201cI think part of the drop in MBA candidates across the market comes from this situation,\u201d he says. \u201cPeople think, \u2018I\u2019d rather stay put in my workplace because I don\u2019t know what\u2019s going to happen.’\u201d<\/p>\n THE COST OF MISSING THE TRAIN<\/p>\n Staying put carries its own risks, he argues \u2014 particularly for workers at organizations not actively experimenting with AI.<\/p>\n \u201cThere\u2019s a cost of opportunity of missing the train,\u201d Badia says.<\/p>\n To anchor the redesign, IESE faculty developed what K\u00e1ganer calls \u201cthe seven questions\u201d \u2013 a framework meant to guide professors as they rethink the managerial dilemmas at the core of each first-year course.<\/p>\n Among them: How should humans and AI collaborate to create value? Who is accountable when AI causes harm? How do we govern AI responsibly? How must leadership evolve for AI-mediated organizations?<\/p>\n Faculty were then asked to revisit the core dilemmas already embedded in their courses and reconsider them through the lens of AI.<\/p>\n \u2018AI AS THE CONTEXT, NOT THE TOOL\u2019<\/p>\n \u201cThis is not about AI as a tool,\u201d K\u00e1ganer says. \u201cIt\u2019s AI as the context.\u201d<\/p>\n That distinction is central to how IESE frames the redesign. The school is not primarily trying to teach prompt engineering or technical skills in isolation. The real work, leaders argue, is preparing people to operate amid ambiguity, shifting organizational structures, and a changing definition of what managers actually do.<\/p>\n The redesign also includes a pre-program AI course developed with Google that introduces students to large language models, AI agents, and retrieval-augmented generation before classes begin. AI boot camps run through the first year. And in one of the more inventive elements of the program, students will build portfolios of AI-related work \u2013 audits, agentic workflow blueprints, vibe-coded MVPs \u2013 that they can bring into recruiting conversations with employers.<\/p>\n \u201cThese are no different from what architects do,\u201d K\u00e1ganer says. \u201cArchitects don\u2019t just show up with a CV. They show up with a portfolio.\u201d<\/p>\n \u00a9 Copyright 2026 Poets & Quants. All rights reserved. This article may not be republished, rewritten or otherwise distributed without written permission. To reprint or license this article or any content from Poets & Quants, please submit your request HERE<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"IESE\u2019s Barcelona campus, where a faculty hackathon last fall drew 85 of the school\u2019s 120 full-time professors to…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":59982,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[24,25,34644,3556],"class_list":["post-59981","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-ai","tag-ai","tag-artificial-intelligence","tag-iese","tag-judgment"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59981","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=59981"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/59981\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/59982"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=59981"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=59981"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=59981"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}![\"Badia-Mar\"](\"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/ai\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/Badia-Marc_IESE.jpg\"\/)
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