AI As The New Religion? The Question Business Schools Should Really Be Asking

For most of human history, religion helped us make sense of what we could not explain.

Lightning. Disease. Death. Fate.

When uncertainty felt unbearable, we built belief systems to stabilize it. Religion did not emerge simply because humans were curious. It emerged because humans are uncomfortable not knowing.

Today, artificial intelligence presents a different kind of unknown.

Not mystical. Not divine.

But opaque.

AI systems increasingly influence who gets hired, who receives loans, what information circulates, how consumers behave, how much are they willing to pay, how supply chains move, and how corporate strategy is shaped. They generate outputs that appear objective, authoritative, and mathematically precise — even when the logic behind them remains inaccessible to most executives who rely on them.

The surface question is seductive:

Is AI becoming the new religion?

But that question flatters us. It suggests we are passive observers of a cultural shift.

The deeper question is far less comfortable: Why are we so ready to surrender judgment in the first place?

OUR DISCOMFORT WITH RESPONSIBILITY

Religion historically provided certainty in the face of chaos. AI provides certainty in the face of complexity.

That is not coincidence.

Modern leadership is exhausting. Decisions are high-stakes, data is overwhelming, stakeholders are unforgiving, and accountability is relentless. Ambiguity has become structural.

AI offers relief. It promises:

• Quantification over intuition
• Prediction over doubt
• Optimization over moral wrestling

When an executive says, “The algorithm decided,” something profound happens. Responsibility subtly shifts from human conscience to computational output.

And that shift feels efficient.

Judgment is heavy. Delegating it feels rational.

The danger is not that AI demands worship. The danger is that leaders welcome abdication.

FROM TOOL TO AUTHORITY

If AI were to assume god-like status, it would not appear in mythic form. It would be embedded in cloud infrastructure and present in dashboards. It would not demand prayer; it would demand data. It would not promise salvation; it would promise optimization.

Its commandments would be performance metrics.

And unlike the gods of old, it would not judge souls — it would score them. Credit scores. Risk scores. Engagement scores. Productivity scores. Satisfaction scores.

But here the analogy breaks.

Religion asks for belief. AI does not require belief. It requires compliance. And compliance is easier than conviction.

What is emerging is not a Church of AI, but a digital sect — a quiet coalition of those who equate data with truth and efficiency with virtue.

In this worldview:

• If the model says it, it must be accurate.
• If it is optimized, it must be right.
• If it is measurable, it must be real.

Optimization becomes morality.

Yet efficiency has never been a substitute for ethics.

More subtly, AI does not just influence decisions. It influences cognition. By curating information flows, predicting preferences, and nudging behavior at scale, it shapes what leaders see, what they prioritize, and what they consider rational. Indoctrination no longer requires sermons.

It requires personalization.

In a world reminiscent of Brave New World by Aldous Huxley, control does not feel coercive. It feels frictionless.

And frictionless systems are rarely questioned.

IT IS NOT THE MACHINE – IT IS US

AI is built by humans. It is not transcendent. It has no will.

But history shows that transcendence is not required for something to be elevated beyond critique.

Humans have repeatedly sacralized their own creations — markets, political systems, ideologies, institutions. What begins as a tool becomes doctrine when enough people find comfort in its authority.

The decisive factor is not whether AI is divine. It is whether we prefer its clarity to our own uncertainty.

We are not drawn to AI because it is mystical. We are drawn to it because it removes the burden of choosing.

THE BUSINESS SCHOOL RECKONING

This is not a theological debate. It is a curriculum question and competencies development question.

If business schools teach students to optimize without teaching them to interrogate optimization itself, they are not producing leaders.

They are producing operators of systems they do not fully question.

The MBA of the future will graduate fluent in analytics, machine learning, and decision science. But fluency is not sovereignty. If students are trained to trust models more than their own moral reasoning — to defer to dashboards rather than wrestle with ambiguity — then leadership quietly shifts from human judgment to algorithmic output.

And that shift will not announce itself.

It will look like efficiency.

It will feel like progress.

It will be rewarded in quarterly earnings.

The real test for business schools is not whether they can integrate AI into the classroom. It is whether they can teach students when to override it — and accept the cost of doing so.

Because the first generation of leaders trained to outsource judgment will not see themselves as surrendering autonomy. They will see themselves as being data-driven.

And the first business culture that normalizes that mindset will not recognize the moment it stops leading — and starts merely executing, becoming an appendix of machine-learning.

The first business school that trains students to optimize without teaching them to question will not notice when it stops producing leaders — and starts producing caretakers of systems they no longer control.

And by the time that realization arrives, the habit of surrender will already be institutionalized.

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Benjamin Stevenin is the former Director of Business School Solutions and Partnerships at Times Higher Education. Dr. Raul Villamarin Rodriguez is the Vice President of Woxsen University in India and a prominent cognitive technologist. Josep Franch is an associate professor of marketing at ESADE Business School in Spain. 

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