How To Build A Future-Fit Institution In A Changing World

It’s impossible to talk about business education in 2025 without mentioning the profound forces driving its change: artificial intelligence, geopolitics, and sustainability. In France – and elsewhere in the world – higher education institutions must prepare students to face the significant changes brought about by these drivers. 

AI, GEOPOLITICS & SUSTAINABILITY: THE FORCES RESHAPING BUSINESS EDUCATION 

Artificial intelligence is no longer a topic that we can relegate to specialised programmes; it is now a defining element of pedagogy, research, and career services. At ESSEC Business School, and across French higher education more broadly, we are rethinking how AI tools can be integrated into teaching, and how they could become co-pilots for learning. It is no longer a matter of whether we use AI in management education, but rather how we can use it responsibly and creatively. 

This debate extends far beyond France. Business schools across the globe are grappling with the task of ensuring that students develop both the techniques and the moral compass that are required to use AI in an efficient and ethical way. Faculty are rethinking assessments to make them less memory-based and more about critical thinking. Career services are evolving too, helping graduates position themselves in an economy where possessing the ‘human touch’ may become the most valuable skill of all. 

At the same time, geopolitical shifts are forcing business schools to rethink how they teach business. ESSEC’s Institute for Geopolitics & Business recently partnered with French weekly magazine L’Express and OpinionWay to publish a barometer on how businesses perceive geopolitical risk. 97% of French leaders reported that their companies had already experienced the consequences of geopolitical upheaval. Despite this, most admitted that their organisations tended to react to rather than anticipate emerging developments, highlighting an urgent need: preparing leaders who can read the world’s political, economic and environmental crosscurrents before they become storms. Our role as educators is to cultivate leaders who can guide their companies through these challenges. 

This is not only a French phenomenon. The world is interconnected through supply chains, alliances, and trade barriers; their shifting nature affects both companies and management education. Schools must teach future managers to navigate crises proactively, with agility and foresight. 

Furthermore, geopolitics doesn’t just influence business strategy; it’s also reshaping where and how students study. The political climate in the United States, for instance, has seen some international students reconsider their learning destinations, creating new opportunities for France, Canada, and other countries to attract globally minded learners.  

 CREATING INSTITUTIONS FOR THE NEXT 25 YEARS

The shifts in education raise an urgent question: how can business schools become institutions suited for the next 25 years? More specifically, how can we become institutions that build future-fit pathways into higher education, reshape the student experience, combine a deep knowledge with a holistic view, and forge symbiotic connections with industries? 

Part of the answer lies within our mindset. Future-fit education prepares students for roles that may not yet exist. As we asked ourselves at ESSEC several years ago: If the jobs of the future don’t exist yet, how can we prepare for them? The response must go beyond updating curriculum: it requires adaptability, curiosity, anticipation, and a dedication to proactive lifelong learning. 

The “shelf life” of professional skills is shrinking rapidly. Once upon a time, a degree would have served as a passport to a lifelong career. In today’s society, it functions more like a visa: valid for a limited time, granting access to new opportunities, and requiring renewal through continuous learning, reskilling and upskilling. This means our institutions must not only educate students at the start of their careers but support them throughout their professional lives. 

To do this, schools are experimenting with flexible, modular learning formats – stackable certificates, online short courses, and hybrid executive programs that allow students to adapt their own education to their professional realities. The goal is to make learning as continuous as work itself. 

At the same time, schools must rethink how they connect academia and industry. Business education no longer happens within the four walls of a lecture room; within partnerships, internships, projects, and research collaborations, ecosystems are created where innovation can thrive.  

In France, the growing collaboration between grandes écoles, startups, and multinational firms reflects this trend. It’s also visible worldwide, as education is becoming more integrated with the real world. 

LOOKING AHEAD: EMBRACING CHANGE, ETHICALLY & OPTIMISTICALLY 

If there is one message I would offer to fellow administrators, faculty, and students, alike, it is this: see progress as positive and shared.  

Somewhere along the way, we have developed a tendency to see change as a bad thing, treating change as a threat: Will AI take our jobs? Will climate change make our world one we don’t recognise? These concerns are real, but our response need not be fear. Instead, we can choose curiosity and proactive commitment. 

For educators, this means asking how we can use AI ethically and effectively, to personalise learning, free up time for human interaction, and improve decision-making. For business schools, it means leading the way toward becoming responsible leaders and developing sustainable, environmentally friendly and resilient business practices. For students, it means keeping an open mind and staying open to learning – regardless of your role in the higher education landscape. 

Business education is, in many ways, at a crossroads – and it is also at a moment of opportunity. The schools that will thrive in the coming decades are those that combine intellect with humanity, specialisation with transversality, tradition with innovation, and local roots with global reach.  

The future of management education will not be written by any one country or by one school, it has to be shaped collectively, by those willing to adapt, collaborate, and imagine new possibilities. In this spirit, perhaps the most “future-fit” skill we can teach across the world is the courage to learn all life long.  

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Vincenzo Vinzi has been dean of France’s ESSEC Business School since 2017.

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