From Boardrooms To Classrooms, WashU Olin Pushes To The Vanguard Of AI Training

For years, business schools have rushed to add AI courses, analytics concentrations, and generative AI workshops. At Washington University in St. Louis Olin Business School, Deputy Dean for Strategy and Innovation Joe MacDonald says that’s no longer enough.

Olin’s latest AI push is built around a broader premise: in the AI era, business schools won’t just educate students — they’ll increasingly train entire organizations.

That thinking sits behind two newly announced initiatives: a $10,000 AI Workforce Transformation Scholarship for students in the school’s new Master’s in AI for Business, and an executive education offering aimed at helping companies move from isolated AI experimentation to enterprise-wide adoption.

MacDonald says the idea came not from an academic committee, but from conversations with corporate leaders.

“We were showcasing some of our research in AI to our national council, and several of these folks were saying, ‘Well, I need this for my company, but I don’t even know what I need inside my company,'” he tells Poets&Quants.

‘PEOPLE ARE COMING TO A DIFFERENT STARTING LINE’

What followed, MacDonald says, was a recognition that many organizations are deeply fragmented in how they approach AI.

”There might be one vertical that’s three, four, five years ahead of the rest of the company,” he says. “And so it’s a question of how do we catch up without slowing that vertical down?”

He believes that challenge — alignment across teams, executives, and workflows — has opened a lane for business schools to become long-term AI partners for companies.

“The natural starting point for them was really their own boardroom,” he says. “The need for an understanding of the enterprise opportunity, alignment within the company, and a sense of prioritization and governance just became very clear.”

‘RIDICULOUSLY BESPOKE’ AI TRAINING

The approach differs from much of what currently floods the executive AI market because, MacDonald argues, AI adoption cannot be standardized.

“With AI, people are coming to a different starting line,” he says. “They all have a different finish line. Some are on boats, some are on foot, some are on bicycles. They’re all running a different race.”

That means Olin’s work with companies has to be “ridiculously bespoke,” he says.

The school has already piloted team-alignment sessions with organizations ranging from Bayer to U.S. Transportation Command. In the Bayer engagement, employees used the sessions to surface the AI tools they were already independently running in their own workflows — often with little coordination across teams.

“Providing that forum for honest conversation allowed that group to really jump forward in a fast way,” MacDonald says.

A DIFFERENT KIND OF AI APPLICANT

The AI shift is also reshaping who applies to business school.

Olin’s specialized master’s programs have traditionally drawn students roughly 22 to 24 years old. The applicant pool for the new AI-focused degree looks different.

“At this point, about a third of the folks applying for this MS in AI for Business are mid-career,” MacDonald says.

Some have been displaced by AI-related restructuring or broader cuts in sectors including higher education. Others recognize they lack skills increasingly expected in AI-driven workplaces.

“They understand the gaps that they might have in their own resume,” he says. “And they’re looking to us to help fill those gaps from a knowledge perspective, but also through real hands-on experience working directly with companies using AI.”

The scholarship is partly aimed at reducing friction for professionals uncertain about investing in another degree.

“With ROI, it’s important to focus on the ‘I’ as well as the ‘R,'” MacDonald says. “We wanted to make it more straightforward for students and show that we’re invested in this with them as well.”

OLIN’S FACULTY HAVE BEEN WORKING ON AI FOR YEARS

Unlike schools now racing to bolt AI onto existing curricula, MacDonald argues Olin’s work in the field stretches back more than a decade. He points to the school’s Olin Award, which recognizes faculty research expected to have the greatest industry impact. Eight of the last 10 winners, he says, have focused on AI-related work.

“Our faculty had been engaged in AI research with companies since longer than Anthropic’s been around,” he says.

One faculty member he returns to repeatedly is Dennis Zhang, a full professor of operations management and marketing who has worked with Airbnb, Alibaba, and Amazon on AI-human interaction problems, warehouse optimization, and marketing analytics. Zhang has won the Olin Award twice.

MacDonald calls Zhang “the future of what a business school faculty member should look like.”

AI IS CHANGING RESEARCH ITSELF

Zhang recently led a faculty seminar on what that future might look like in practice: he described completing a research paper — from initial idea through data gathering, literature review, and drafting — in three days. MacDonald says the same work would have taken roughly 18 months just a few years ago.

Other Olin faculty are studying AI’s effects from multiple angles. Lamar Pierce, the Beverly & James Hance Professor of Strategy and editor-in-chief of Organization Science, just published research showing that AI has driven a 42% surge in journal submissions since ChatGPT’s release — while manuscript quality has declined. Jeremy Bertomeu, an associate professor of accounting, used Italy’s temporary 2023 ChatGPT ban as a natural experiment to measure AI’s impact on firm productivity and investor behavior.

MacDonald says the broader AI shift is now showing up across Olin’s entire portfolio. The school has integrated AI tools into its Center for Experiential Learning, which oversees more than 500 company projects annually. Students working on consulting engagements are increasingly using AI workflows that MacDonald says often exceed what the partner companies themselves are using.

“When students are applying for jobs, they can say: here’s the company I worked with, here were the AI tools and techniques I used, and here were the outcomes,” he says. “That’s a big deal now.”

FROM ANALYTICS TO ORGANIZATIONAL ALIGNMENT

MacDonald sees the new Master’s in AI for Business as an evolution of Olin’s existing analytics programs — taking the skills, techniques, and faculty that made that offering strong and reorienting them around AI. The executive education and organizational alignment work, though, is something different.

“One session doesn’t solve things forever,” he says. “We know how different these tools and technologies are going to be in three, six, nine months.”

That ongoing uncertainty, he says, is why companies are looking to business schools not just for talent pipelines, but for sustained guidance on how to use what’s already in their hands.

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