To Turn Managers Into Builders, Yale SOM Updates Its MBA Core

 

Before her MBA, Eunkyoung “EK” Im spent most of her career in finance. She studied education and law as an undergraduate. She had no background in coding or software development.

She signed up for Tauhid Zaman’s AI MBA elective, Generative AI and Social Media, because she feared falling behind.

Within the first 30 minutes of the first lecture, Im, a Class of 2027 MBA at Yale School of Management, watched Zaman turn an idea into a viable product. Zaman sketched a rough website dashboard on the board, took a photo, uploaded it to Gemini, and generated a prompt to feed into the AI-powered vibe coder, Cursor. In the time it takes most people to eat breakfast, Zaman had created a working prototype.

“That was a real culture shock for me,” Im says. “I realized that AI was not just a tool for answering questions or generating content. It could be a collaborator that helps turn an idea into something real.”

Im’s experience is precisely why Yale is making one of the most significant changes to its core MBA curriculum in at least a decade. Beginning this fall, a version of Zaman’s AI elective will be required for all incoming first-years. Other core courses will be updated to build upon the AI foundations learned in the course.

Zaman has described this era of AI adoption as a Promethean moment. AI gives anyone who knows how to use it the power to turn big ideas into creations quickly, accurately, and cheaply. Yale MBAs will be expected not just to learn the tools and capabilities, but to build something with them.

“I’m just the tool guy, like Prometheus handing out the fire from Mount Olympus,” says Zaman, associate professor of operations management and SOM’s special advisor for its AI initiative.

“You have the fire now. Go and light up the world.”

UPDATING YALE’S MBA CORE

Yale SOM introduced its integrated core curriculum 20 years ago, and it does not overhaul it lightly. But in about a year, Zaman’s AI course moved from elective to the required core course with unanimous faculty approval — practically warp speed for academia.

The AI course will lay the foundation for the rest of the core where students will be expected to use AI tools while also wrestling with what AI means for organizations, workers and society. Instead of, say, running an Excel regression analysis in a statistics assignment, MBAs will be instructed to use AI to get to more creative outputs.

For example, in SOM’s core Innovator course, students will explore AI through entrepreneurship and innovation frameworks. In Workforce, which covers HR strategy and leadership, students will study how AI and automation may reshape management, employee roles, talent pipelines, and more.

And, in State and Society, students will consider AI’s wider impact at the intersection of business and government. In keeping with Yale SOM’s mission — educating leaders for business and society — the course will examine the human judgment required around AI, including questions of algorithmic bias, social impact and accuracy.

“Our students are the generation living through this transition and the ones who will determine how AI use evolves,” says Edieal Pinker, BearingPoint Professor of Operations Research and special advisor to the dean.

“The combination of practical experience and big-picture thinking will create an environment where people from many backgrounds with varying points of view can engage fruitfully on questions related to the effectiveness, ethics, and impact of artificial intelligence.”

‘ONE-PERSON UNICORNS’

MBAs will take Zaman’s AI foundation course in the first half of the first semester, laying the groundwork right at the start. He will start with the AI imperative for managers and lead them through vibe coding by building a document analyzer web application. MBAs will also learn to use AI tools to automate web search and code inside workflows.

Students will also learn how retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) can connect AI agents to large-scale data, how to build conversational agents for customer service, and visual intelligence for creative assets. They’ll work through document intelligence, build AI personal assistants, and learn tokenomics — how much an AI workflow costs to run and how to efficiently design agents to cut those costs.

The idea is to get MBAs to break through the initial fear early so that they are willing to try new AI approaches on their own, long after they leave SOM.

Rather than just a threat to jobs or a slop generator, when used well, Zaman believes AI can unlock creative and entrepreneurial capacity in students who never before considered themselves technical builders.

“Our MBAs are becoming like one-person unicorns,” he says. “You’re unlocking all this creative potential that creates value for people.”

Students who took the elective version of the course agree. Hugo Yu, MBA ’27, learned to create tools that could analyze social media, simulate online populations, build web apps, generate videos, and turn loose ideas into prototypes.

“Professor Zaman’s course was one of the most practical and career-relevant classes I have taken at SOM,” he says. “It helped me move from ‘understanding AI’ to actually building with AI. For MBA students, I think that shift is incredibly important.”

WHAT MBAs WILL BUILD

To see what the new required course may unleash, look at what students built in the elective version.

Im, who worked as a Yale accessibility assistant, created a chatbot, STAR GUIDE, to generate alternative text for images, charts and graphs so that low-vision students can access course materials. Alternative text is time-consuming, requiring accuracy, neutrality and judgment. It can take a long time, and the quality can vary depending on who writes the description.

“I learned how to give the AI agent the right prompts and instructions so that the output matches the level of detail and style we actually need for accessibility work, rather than just producing a generic description,” she says.

“This experience showed me that AI is not only for students pursuing technology careers. It can matter in education, accessibility, operations, regulation, finance, and almost any field where people are trying to solve real problems.”

For a class assignment, Shruti Shambhavi, a Master of Advanced Management student in the Class of 2026, built a multimodal app that used a webcam to capture facial expressions while someone watched a YouTube video. An AI interviewer then referenced those reactions and generated a final sentiment report.

“It felt like a glimpse into the future of audience research and consumer insight tools,” she says.

Yu’s final project was YoSOM, a two-sided AI system for Yale dining. On the student side, his team built a mobile-first chatbot that let students share food preferences, vote on menu ideas and flag dietary needs. On the manager side, they built a vendor dashboard that turned student feedback into an AI-generated operations brief, complete with menu recommendations, demand forecasts, budget impact, and promotional posters.

“It showed how AI can turn messy, unstructured human input into structured business decisions,” Yu says.

Yu came to Yale SOM after working as a product manager at TikTok, where he focused on e-commerce search and AI-powered product experiences. This summer, he is a product manager intern at Cisco working on AI AgenticOps for wireless networking operations, working to spot problems earlier, diagnose what went wrong and recommend fixes before issues escalate

“The speed of AI development also changes what feels possible,” Yu says. “It frees your imagination. Things that used to feel too complex or too expensive to build can now be prototyped quickly. That opens up many new opportunities for business innovation.

“In this AI era, I think curiosity and willingness to use the newest tools hands-on are even more important than having a traditional technical background.”

THE POET’S TIME TO SHINE?

Zaman is himself a classic quant. He earned his BS, MEng, and PhD in electrical engineering and computer science from MIT. Before coming to SOM, he taught at MIT Sloan.

But in the age of generative AI, he thinks poets may have the advantage.

MBAs need to understand the “topological invariants” of technology — the essential shape of how something works — without necessarily mastering every detail of a programming language. They should understand that Python exists, that some languages are useful for web pages and others for more mathematical work, but the AI can now often choose which is best and write the code itself.

“The poets are going to have an edge, in my opinion, because the poet can articulate themselves better and come up with more creative ideas for AI,” he says. “I’m a quant but, at some point, that poet’s going to be as quanty as I am. Am I going to be as creative and as imaginative as they are?”

Daniel Baglini, MBA ‘27, is a former Army intelligence officer who served across Europe and the Middle East, providing intelligence support to NATO partners and responding to the Russia-Ukraine and Israel-Gaza crises. He led teams on complex operational problems and later served as an Innovation Cell Director, where he helped support the first conventional U.S. Army FPV drone strike in Vilnius, Lithuania.

He had never heard of vibe coding before Zaman’s elective. But in it, he built a Connect Four-style game, his own website, and an application to demonstrate how better education policy could be supported in Rhode Island. He is now a summer associate at McKinsey & Company.

“The course made AI feel like a multiplier of ideas. It gave me the ability to take something that previously would have stayed as a concept and turn it into a working prototype,” he says.

“The challenging part is that you are learning by doing, which means things break and you have to figure out why. But that is also what makes the course empowering.”

THE NEW MBA SKILL SET

The course changed how Baglini thinks about consulting, the path he is pursing after graduation. He believes AI will move the field beyond static slides and documents toward interactive web applications to explore implications of decisions in real time.

“A client could adjust assumptions and immediately see how changes to workflow, staffing, capacity, or market expansion might affect output, profit, or other performance metrics,” he says. “That is a much more powerful way to persuade people and help them make decisions.”

Zaman says the new course — and the rest of the core curriculum — will change frequently to keep pace with AI’s evolution. But the deeper skills students are building are more durable. Those include the confidence to try, the creativity to imagine new approaches, and the resilience to keep going when things break. He hopes students leave not merely more employable, but with the ability to think bigger.

Used effectively and creatively, AI can feel like having “10 people working for you that are super smart and super cheap,” Zaman says.

“What would you do with that army of people?”

Baglini agrees. This required course and core update will affect every post-MBA job. Any student, MBA or otherwise, can now start with a passion project, explain what they want to build, and, with enough iteration, produce something that works and feels professional. That expands what managers, entrepreneurs, consultants and operators can realistically create on their own.

“I don’t think it’s an exaggeration to say that the rise of AI, and especially the ability to vibe code, will be comparable in impact to the invention of the printing press,” he says.

“You don’t need to become a software engineer to benefit from this skill. You need to understand what’s possible, how to test ideas quickly, and how to use AI to turn concepts into working prototypes.

“In ten years, I think this kind of AI fluency will be expected of business leaders. Yale is ahead of the curve by making it part of the core MBA experience now.”

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