At EDHEC, AI Education Starts With A Pen & Paper

In an amphitheater at EDHEC Business School in France, 350 students sat almost in silence, writing out their homework for a lesson about artificial intelligence. Now that most assignments and meetings are done by screen, the sound of pens scratching paper startled even the seasoned professors.

“All the professors said, ‘Wow, this never happens,’” says Michelle Sisto, founder and director of EDHEC’s Artificial Intelligence Centre.

In January, EDHEC launched its Me, Myself and AI bootcamp for all of its 700 pre-master’s students to make them stop and think without their tech. Fourteen instructors from different disciplines taught the course, directing students to keep a journal reflecting on how they learn, how they are using AI, and where the technology may help – or hurt – their learning.

Sisto called that first silence a moment of grace, a window into how EDHEC is approaching one of the loudest transformations in business education. As schools race to add AI courses, tools, tracks and certificates, EDHEC is trying to build AI across the institution without making AI the center of the institution.

“While we need to understand AI and incorporate it into business strategies, usage must be human centric and value-driven,” says Sisto, associate professor of AI and decision sciences and associate dean at EDHEC.

That means focusing on tools and implementation, sure. But also focusing on why and when we use AI and the impact on learning and human interaction.

More simply: “Let’s not just ask, what can it do, but what should we do?”

ADDING THE HUMAN TOUCH

Sisto’s background is in math and computer science. She was studying expert systems, an early approach to AI, back in the 1980s, decades before ChatGPT was released to the public in late 2022. She recognized its implications for business and business education as soon as she started playing around with it.

“I thought, ‘This is going to change profoundly what we do,’” Sisto told the crowd of alumni and MBAs during EDHEC Alumni’s April panel discussion in London, Replacement or Reinvention? How AI is redefining skills, work and careers.

“I wanted to be part of that movement.”

Sisto founded the EDHEC AI center in 2024, organized around three pillars: integrating AI across EDHEC’s curriculum; researching its impact on education, work, and human cognition; and building outreach, community and thought leadership inside and beyond the school.

The school has since added AI and innovation tracks to established programs. It added AI courses and embedded content at every level, from bachelor’s to PhD. It is upskilling its faculty and reaching out to other institutions to collaborate on responsible implementation.

Central to the work are large questions that are hard to answer. For example, what kind of judgment is needed in the decisions we are handing over to AI assistants and agents? Not just for students, but for faculty, industry leaders, and governments.

“A big aspect that we really want to focus on is human agency. AI is getting better every single day at cognitive tasks, at creative tasks, and now even at decision making and taking actions with agentic AI,” Sisto says.

“Now, we are talking a lot about how do we build in guardrails? Where do we put a human in the loop?”

EDHEC’S AI CURRICULUM

One of the AI Center’s first missions was to integrate AI across EDHEC’s curriculum. It developed an AI competency framework to map the skills needed for the AI citizen (including students), the AI solution architect (those working in AI); and the AI leader. Work was inspired by frameworks from UNESCO’s AI competency for students and the Alan Turing Institute’s AI Skills for Business.

In 2025, the school redesigned its digital innovation track for its Global MBA to focus entirely on AI and its ongoing transformation of business, work, and society. The track is designed to move students from basic AI literacy to applied AI leadership, with courses on digital transformation, hands-on AI applications, and an industry project sourced from business partners.

EDHEC’s new AI-Augmented Leadership & Performance track will launch for executive MBAs in October.

All 700 of EDHEC’s Grande École students take Me, Myself and AI, the seminar that asks them to put pen to paper to reflect on their own judgment, ethics, and agency in their AI engagement. Built around the LEAD framework (Learning, Ethics, Accuracy, and Development), it uses ethical case studies and prompt engineering workshops that move students from basic queries to more sophisticated use of large language models.

The school also offers a MSc in Data Analytics & Artificial Intelligence as well as a Data Science & AI for Business track for its MiM. BBA students participate in AI hackathons, specialized tracks, and “learning-by-doing” projects.

The bigger challenge is teaching students to lead with judgement.

“We’re still a very human-centered MBA,” says Inge De Clippeleer, associate professor and Head of Faculty – Management & Humanities at EDHEC. “I think that’s our value proposition in the market.”

De Clippeleer, a Poets&Quants 40-Under-40 Best MBA Professor of 2024, developed EDHEC’s signature Lead360 program for MBA personal and career development. AI leadership is not just about knowing which tools to use, she says. It is about knowing how to use them in ways that expand thinking rather than narrow it.

That includes teaching students to write prompts that are “facilitative to divergent thinking instead of convergence,” De Clippeleer says.

Leaders are already navigating environments that are faster paced, less predictable, and AI just adds another layer of complexity. That makes change management even more central to the MBA, she says.

UPSKILLING FACULTY FOR AI

As fast as AI is changing business and business schools, it is changing the work of business professors.

A big challenge is trying to build formal programs on established courses, some of which now have a shelf life of a matter of months.

“Prompt engineering was very cutting edge two years ago,” Sisto says. “Six months later, it feels old fashioned.”

EDHEC’s response is to build structures for experimentation and sharing instead of issuing a policy or sending faculty to a one-time training. Faculty have formed communities of learning to disseminate how they use AI in their fields, their research, and their classrooms. The school’s AI for Research and Education Initiative meets roughly every three weeks while a separate group meets every Friday, bringing together faculty and staff to trade use cases, experiments and lessons from the week.

“Instead of feeling intimidated or behind or lost, we’re kind of upskilling each other,” Sisto says.

EDHEC’s Pedagogical Innovation Laboratory (PiLab) helps professors with instructional design, video, data analytics, and classroom technology.

“What we do at the PiLab is support all professors,” says Claudia Carrone, an EDHEC MBA alumna who manages PiLab on the Nice Campus. “If you are an expert, we’ll adapt to your expertise. If you are scared, you don’t know what’s happening, we also are here to take you by the hand.”

Some professors are already building assistants, testing avatars as course tutors, or redesigning assessments. Others are still trying to understand what AI means for a case they have taught for five years, now that students can feed it into ChatGPT. Carrone sees PiLab’s job as helping both groups move without getting lost in either the hype or the fear.

RESEARCH & THE HUMAN COST OF SPEED

The AI Center is also building a research agenda around the myriad questions AI is raising. Its AI for Research and Education (AIRE) forum disseminates innovations and challenges faced to faculty across disciplines.

Sisto is particularly interested in the cognitive effects of AI, including whether students lose confidence when a machine seems faster or more capable than they are.

She is also interested in what managers will need to lead hybrid human-AI teams, how agentic AI will be adopted inside companies, and where AI implementations stall.

EDHEC’s leaders are not naïve about the pace of AI development or the limits of business schools to control it. The same technology that can help students build assistants, personalize learning or help executives map company use cases also raises unresolved questions about accountability, bias, regulation and human agency.

One of the clearest examples is agentic AI, which can act with increasing levels of autonomy. In business, those tools may soon manage workflows, process customer information, run analyses, communicate with other systems and make recommendations that affect real people.

“How do you audit the behavior of these agentic AI workflows?” Sisto says. “Where’s the accountability? Who’s going to be in charge?”

Because such questions are too large for one school to answer alone, EDHEC’s AI Centre has made outreach and partnerships one of its three pillars. It is a founding member of the Responsible AI Consortium, along with Luiss Business School in Rome, Imperial College Business School in London, and QS.

It is also a member of the Digital Education Council, a global network driving sustainable innovation and AI adoption in education and workforce development, as well as the FOME Alliance, a partnership with Imperial, John’s Hopkins, LUISS, ESMT, Vlerick and others to study student use of Generative AI.

“We recognize this as a systemic, wide societal and institutional challenge,” she says. “It’s not something that we’re going to solve individually.”

DON’T MISS: EDHEC EXECUTIVE MBA LAUNCHES NEW AI TRACK FOR SENIOR LEADERS AND REPLACE OR REINVENT? B-SCHOOLS CONFRONT UNCERTAINTY AROUND AI, JOBS, AND THE MBA PIPELINE 

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