The New MBA Arms Race: How Stanford Is Winning On AI

Abby Alder, Jenni Steiger, Alfredo Mendez, and Celeste Bean, the four MBA student co-founders of AI@GSB

At most business schools, artificial intelligence is entering the curriculum through lectures, electives, and case studies. At Stanford Graduate School of Business, it is showing up as something more urgent and far more practical: a working skill students are expected to use now.

That distinction helps explain the rapid rise of AI@GSB, a student-led initiative that has quickly become one of the most visible forces shaping how Stanford MBAs learn about artificial intelligence. Through hands-on workshops, practitioner sessions, applied projects, and direct engagement with leading builders in the field, the program is pushing students beyond AI literacy toward something closer to fluency.

In the middle of that movement is second-year MBA Jenni Steiger, a former chief of staff at BlackRock who came to Stanford with no formal technology background and now stands as one of the key architects of the school’s applied AI push.

“A lot of schools are starting to teach about it,” Steiger tells Poets&Quants. “But they’re not doing the applied AI the way we are.”

HOW AI HAS RESHAPED THE STANFORD MBA EXPERIENCE

Stanford GSB Dean Sarah Soule

For Stanford, located a short drive from the world’s most influential AI companies and venture firms, the stakes are obvious. Employers hiring MBAs increasingly want graduates who understand not only strategy and leadership, but how to deploy new tools, redesign workflows, and make better decisions in an AI-shaped economy. At Stanford, the expectation is that graduates will not only arrive ready. They will teach everyone else how to smartly leverage this new disruptive technology.

Dean Sarah Soule says the school’s challenge is twofold: give students access to the latest AI tools while strengthening the human capabilities machines cannot replace. “We need to really double down on that while we’re also making sure that they are exposed to the latest thinking in AI, the latest tools in AI, and the latest thinking on how we need to use this new technology responsibly and ethically,” she says (see Stanford GSB Dean Sarah Soule On AI, Leadership & Why Human Skills Matter More Than Ever).

Under Soule, a long-time OB professor who became dean in June of 2025, the business school has gone all-in on AI. In 2025–26, some three dozen courses at the GSB highlighted or integrated AI or machine learning for MBA and MSx students. They range from technically-focused electives such as Understanding AI Technology for Business Problems and Artificial Intelligence and Accounting Information to big picture overviews such as The Future of AI in Work: A Lab for Startups and AI & Power: Five Big Questions. Even the school’s famous Startup Garage now kicks off with a 60-minute AI-powered hackathon.

The school’s Artificial Intelligence Club, founded in 2021 to highlight AI innovations and business impact, is now the largest MBA student organization with 597 members, even larger than the GSB’s Entrepreneurship Club, with 530 members. Last year, the club planned over 15 events, including panels, discussions, and fireside chats with industry leaders.

THE MOMENT THE LIGHTS WENT ON

Yet, the most consequential–and differentiating–part of the AI revolution at Stanford may well be a student-centered initiative initiated by Steiger who has no technical background. She certainly did not come to business school intending to become an AI evangelist.

Before Stanford, she worked at global asset management powerhouse BlackRock in a role far removed from engineering or software development. Steiger, a self-described “bulldozer” devoted to getting things done, had been on the chief of staff team for BlackRock Chairman and CEO Larry Fink. But once on campus, she sensed the ground shifting. Large language models were improving rapidly. The workplace she had left suddenly looked very different from the one she would re-enter.

“I think our year was the inflection point when LLMs got so good,” says Steiger, who started her MBA in September of 2024. “We were like, uh-oh, we’re going back to a workforce that’s very meaningfully different than the one we left.”

The turning point came in an April of 2025 class called Research Driven Innovation, taught by Scott Brady and Brett Jordan. A guest speaker, Diego Oppenheimer, demonstrated AI tools for research workflows. Oppenheimer, a serial entrepreneur and investor who has been working with large-language models and data for nearly 20 years, lectured on how to use the new technology to create an AI-first organization.

Calling himself an “AI maximalist,” his enthusiasm was unmistakable. “We are at the absolute best moment ever in history for this kind of tooling,” he told the class. “This is not going to do the work for you but it is an amazing accelerant.”

What Steiger and her classmates heard convinced her this was no incremental change.

“I was like, whoa, this is a whole different thing now.”

HOW AI HAS IMPACTED STANFORD’S MBA CURRICULUM

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