Leading AI Adoption: From Behavior to Strategy

• Rapid advances in AI reflect a broader pattern of technological disruption, prompting institutions to proactively rethink their strategies and capabilities.
• Sustainable AI adoption depends as much on behavioral change as on the technology itself, and AI champions embedded throughout the school can be critical drivers of that change.
• As AI transforms the workplace, leadership will increasingly mean orchestrating systems of humans and intelligent machines. Business education must prepare students to manage these hybrid teams.

Transcript

Lee Newman: [00:13] These are interesting times. I think these are times of disruption in technology. But I think also the behavioral aspect of this is very important. Right, because we have AI and more people working with AI. And if we look back at tech disruption, one of the things that I’ve learned is that, number one, you can’t stop technology.

[00:33] So, if I go back to the dot-com era, when I was doing startups in New York City, people were saying, ‘No, people are not going to put their information online. Online doesn’t feel like a safe place.’ There were many questions about privacy.

[00:44] Some of the things we’re questioning now, but look where we are—people do it. I mean, we have profiles everywhere. And yes, we’re concerned about our privacy, but we’re doing it. I think that tech happens, and you can see that the big disruptive technologies can’t be stopped.

[00:58] My first takeaway is that you really have to disrupt yourself. As soon as you see it coming, you need to start thinking, where might this go? Maybe there are multiple answers to that question. And what do I need to do to learn about this and to disrupt myself to keep up with it? Right, I think that’s one.

[01:17] And the second is that technology adoption always involves behavior change. Almost always with these big technologies, whether it was the rise of the internet or AI agents, we’re asking people to do things, to use things that aren’t necessarily natural. They’re new, they’re different.

One of the things that I’ve learned is that, number one, you can’t stop technology.

[01:37] I think sometimes we don’t spend enough time thinking about the behavioral change aspect. There are many things we know from behavioral science about tech adoption. So if you can lower the barrier for people to use technology in a way that fits with their existing workflows and ways of thinking, you get faster adoption.

[01:56] From a business school standpoint, I think there’s a tsunami coming. It’s coming from the world of work. The fundamentals of work are changing. Frontline jobs are being converted from humans to AI, and we’re going to see more and more of that.

[02:10] So the question is, what’s the future for business professionals? And if you think of work as the executional part of doing work, we might think of it as the frontline and analysts of the past, and you think about orchestrating work. Many of the jobs in the frontline executional roles, I think, are at risk. We’ve heard that many times.

[02:36] But I think, in a way, AI may be creating the perfect moment when the orchestration of work becomes the most important thing. We could call that management, but I think somehow it’s going to evolve a bit. I like to call it orchestration. And what we need to teach our students is that we source great talent within human teams.

[02:58] We need to identify the right people and deploy them to the right projects because they have the right skills. We need to do the same thing with AI. We’re starting to teach our students how to build teams where you have humans and machines working together and understanding what is the right AI for this role, what is the right human for this role, and is the right thing for this role a human or machine?

AI may be creating the perfect moment when the orchestration of work becomes the most important thing.

[03:25] Coworking with AI is something really important that we’re working on, and we need to do more, and we all need to be working on it. At the same time, we need to teach these AI skills in a management context. If there’s hope that we’ll still have jobs, let’s see what happens when we reach artificial general intelligence (AGI). But assuming that’s further out, it’s the critical thinking skills that make the biggest difference.

[03:53] You listen to industry and associations like SHRM here in the United States and its equivalents in Europe. They’re telling us that these cognitive, critical, and creative thinking skills, along with systems thinking skills, are what we really need to be doing with our students. So, at the same time that we’re focused on tech orchestration, we need to be investing more in the fundamentals of thinking, how to think well.

[04:23] That is something new because that might be called humanities in many universities. I think business schools are going to be moving closer to that, but maybe humanities and critical thinking in the context of business. That’s where we’re gonna play an important role: making sure it’s not just fundamental critical thinking skills, but critical thinking skills you know how to apply in a business context. And that’s really important.

[04:52] At IE Business School, we’re integrating AI in a very strategic way. We have, I would say, five lines of strategic deployment. First, we’re integrating it into the front and back offices, non-academic operations. So, how we run our service departments: marketing, recruitment, IT, HR, etc. We have another line: academic operations. So, how we deliver our programs and experiences to students and student success management.

[05:23] There’s a third line, which is essentially AI in curricula. What do we teach? We’re pushing a lot down that pathway. The fourth one is AI and methodology. Not what we teach, not the content, but how we teach using AI. And so, AI tutors and AI bots, etc. Then the fifth line, of course, is research and scholarship, and using AI to boost research productivity. That’s our view on it, and from a strategic standpoint, we’re really taking a top-down and bottom-up approach.

Cognitive, critical, and creative thinking skills, along with systems thinking skills, are what we really need to be doing with our students.

[05:56] We’re a business school within a university, but we’re the largest school. We have a lot of, let’s say, sway within the university, and we drive a lot of the thinking. Top-down, we are setting, at the executive committee level, priorities for AI, what we want in the institution. We are putting in place very important incentive systems—both monetary and non-monetary incentive systems—for staff and faculty to adopt AI in their own work. And we’re pushing training, making it very obligatory for all people to do. That’s a very top-down approach.

[06:30] From the bottom-up approach, we have placed AI champions in every department and unit, who have volunteered and been appointed. Their mission is to help their teams adopt AI. But as champions, they’re supposed to raise successes and failures so we can see them at the institutional level, share the successes, and try to avoid the failures we’re seeing across different groups. We’re encouraging them to experiment, and that’s another thing we’re doing top-down.

[06:59] So, bottom-up, it’s about AI champions. It’s also about faculty working together individually on their own courses and their own curricular development, using AI, and then trying to find out what’s working and what’s not working for faculty and spreading that across the institution. We have those five lines of deployment, and, really, for us, it’s a top-down, bottom-up approach that meets in the middle.

[07:21] Then, the last piece I would mention in terms of our approach to AI implementation is partnerships, and we have a quite important partnership with OpenAI at the institutional level. Every staff member, faculty member, and student has a ChatGPT account within an IE–ChatGPT ecosystem that we’ve co-developed with OpenAI. We’re working in task forces with people from OpenAI to think through how this will work and what new things can be done with ChatGPT within a university and a business school. It’s exciting.