Doubling Down On Soft Skills In The Age Of AI: IMD’s Omar Toulan Reinvents The MBA

At a time when artificial intelligence seems poised to swallow every technical task in sight, Omar Toulan is doing something few deans have done: he’s doubling down on the human side of management.

The MBA dean at Switzerland’s IMD Business School has spent the past year implementing a reinvention the school’s MBA program around what he calls transversal skills—the essential human capabilities that cut across disciplines and determine whether managers can actually lead. These include judgment, storytelling, communication, pattern recognition, and presence—skills that rarely appear on a syllabus, but that, as Toulan insists, “make the difference between being heard and being ignored.”

“These are skills that are fundamentally important but don’t get focused on enough,” he says. “Unless you make them a specific focus, they don’t get the attention they need.”

THE TRANSVERSAL SKILLS REVOLUTION

In January of this year, IMD introduced a two-week module at the very start of its 12-month MBA program devoted entirely to ten transversal skills (see table below for all ten skills), from pattern recognition and systems thinking to storyboarding and storytelling.  Students receive personalized reports that assess how they demonstrate these abilities across courses and assignments. Then they revisit those reports throughout the year in one-on-one feedback sessions with Toulan himself.

He met individually with two-thirds of the MBA class—nearly 70 students—to walk through the findings. “Some would say, ‘I’m analytical—why does the report say otherwise?’ And I’d tell them, ‘You may be good, but you’re not showing it.’That conversation is where growth happens.”

To keep these skills top of mind, IMD redesigned many assignments. Students now submit up to eight video-based presentations over the course of the year, all analyzed with AI tools that provide feedback on their communication and storytelling skills, among other things. “The technology gives detailed feedback on how you present—your structure, your flow, your ability to convince,” Toulan explains. “But we don’t call it an assessment. Under European regulations, professors must grade all coursework. The AI only gives feedback.”

Professors still grade traditional content—marketing plans, case analyses, and finance models—but AI complements them by evaluating process: the student’s reasoning, structure, and clarity. “If you submit a marketing strategy, the AI can flag whether you’ve considered all the relevant variables,” he says. “It might tell you, ‘In the Trader Joe’s case, you could have analyzed asset turnover more effectively.’ It’s like a mirror for how you think.”

Students receive three skill reports during the year—each roughly fifteen pages long—charting their progress. In April, they get their first report; by June, Toulan sits down for one-on-one meetings to discuss results; a final report arrives in late summer, followed by another conversation if students want it. Participation is voluntary, but interest has been overwhelming. “Two-thirds of the class asked for private meetings,” he says. “That’s a big signal.”

AI AS A ‘SPARING PARTNER’

Toulan delights in the irony: using artificial intelligence to strengthen the very skills machines can’t replicate. “AI has become a sparring partner,” he says. “You use it to practice, to reflect, to get sharper. But what’s really being developed are the human skills—presentation, persuasion, and storytelling.”

As the syllabus for the introductory module clearly notes: “In this course, we want you to use your imagination and be creative. While we will present you with a variety of approaches and frameworks, please remember these are tools, to which one should NOT become a slave. These tools will help inform you, but at the end being a strategic thinker comes down to being able to shift fluidly between the details and the larger picture, identify important patterns in complex environments, anticipate and influence the reactions of key players, and communicate effectively.”

Toulan often quotes from John Henry Newman’s 1852 classic The Idea of a University, written as a defense of liberal education during the Industrial Revolution. “Newman said education gives a person a clear and conscious view—it teaches judgment and helps you see behind the scenes. That’s what transversal skills do,” Toulan notes. “We’re in a similar time now. AI can present facts, but it cannot convince someone of an argument. It can’t move people emotionally.”

Still, he has no hesitation in leveraging technology. “AI gives us objectivity and scale,” he says. “It allows us to provide detailed, consistent feedback across the entire class in a way no human team could. And it helps professors see patterns that cross disciplines—skills like decision-making, communication, and problem solving.”

INSIDE THE FEEDBACK LOOP

IMD’s system collects between 28 and 30 data points per student in each cycle. Some skills have as many as five indicators—from written analysis to oral presentation to reflection exercises. “We saw clear improvement between the first and second reports, especially in pattern recognition and analytical reasoning,” Toulan says. “You could literally see the storytelling coming through by the end of the year.”

The reports remain strictly confidential—shared only with Toulan, two members of IMD’s data team, and the student. “We don’t give them to employers,” he says firmly. “This is about self-development, not screening.” Each report is reviewed by a human before release. “We had professors regrade samples to ensure alignment within one standard deviation. The results matched quite closely. Still, we run a quality check until we’re confident in the system.”

A sample composite report (see report’s summary page below) obtained by Poets&Quants brings the ten skills to life. After delivering general feedback on a student’s skill in pattern recognition, for example, the report identifies what the student should do to improve: “To further enhance performance, focus on identifying more complex patterns and analyzing their broader implications. Delve deeper into specific strategies and their impacts, and explore additional contexts to provide a more comprehensive understanding.”

For decision making, particularly identifying one’s ability to assess risk and drawbacks, the report’s feedback is straightforward: “The evaluation indicates that the speaker has a foundational understanding of risk assessment, identifying some key drawbacks such as reliance on import slabs from Brazil. However, the assessment lacks depth, particularly in terms of quantitative analysis and detailed mitigation strategies. While the speaker can identify risks, there is a need for more comprehensive evaluations that include probabilities and specific mitigation plans.”

To improve, the report counsels the student to “incorporate quantitative probabilities and detailed mitigation strategies in their risk assessments. This includes discussing potential impacts and proposing specific actions to address identified risks.”

© Copyright 2025 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.