What this means in practice

To put this role into practice, business schools must focus on three priorities.

First, combine technological fluency with knowledge and judgement. At NEOMA Business School, students learn how to use AI tools, but also when to question them. They must understand a subject well enough to identify hallucinations, weak premises or inappropriate recommendations.

We reinforce that judgement through the humanities. In a course exploring management and leadership through great literary texts, The Odyssey prompts a deceptively simple question: Ulysses reached Ithaca but returned without his crew. Can a project be called successful if its objective is achieved at that human cost? Such questions teach students to assess both results and responsibility.

Second, preserve the collective dimension of learning. In-person education matters because students learn by challenging one another, reading a room, resolving disagreements and building projects together. Digital tools can enrich this experience, but they cannot replace it. NEOMA’s collaborative spaces are designed to support formal teamwork as well as the informal exchanges from which new ideas and projects often emerge.

Third, expose students to real organisational situations, including those they cannot access physically. One NEOMA virtual-reality case takes students inside a nuclear power plant, a site a class could not ordinarily visit. Immersion turns an abstract case into a shared situation: students observe the environment, weigh constraints and discuss the consequences of their decisions.

Company challenges serve the same purpose when employers and students work on a real question together. Students gain a clearer view of operational expectations, while organisations see how younger talent approaches the problem.

A two-way responsibility

Business education has always looked ahead. Today, that requires more than anticipating which jobs and technologies will emerge. Schools must understand how expectations are changing on both sides of the labour market and act on that understanding.

Young people need technical fluency, but also knowledge, judgement and the ability to work with others. Employers need those same capabilities, while rethinking the management and HR practices that will attract a generation that defines progress differently.

Business schools are among the few institutions able to bridge these two transformations together and translate that into graduates, programmes and partnerships that actually work.