NEOMA Business School Dean: In The Age Of AI, B-Schools Must Bridge 2 Worlds

AI is changing the workplace faster than companies can redesign jobs, and faster than students can predict the careers they are getting prepared for. Employers are still defining the skills they need. Young people are trying to understand where they can add value when machines can already draft reports, analyze data and generate ideas.

This is where business schools have a distinctive role. Because we work closely with both students and employers, that bridge works in both directions: helping companies understand a generation whose expectations of work are changing, and helping students understand what organizations will expect of them. This role is not new. But in a world moving this quickly, it has become more important than ever.

AI RAISES THE VALUE OF HUMAN JUDGMENT 

AI can draft, synthesize and model scenarios at remarkable speed. But it cannot replace the judgment required to frame the right question, challenge an implausible answer, or take responsibility for a decision. The better students understand a topic, the more effectively they can use AI as an aid to analysis rather than as a substitute for thought.

At NEOMA, our approach to implementing and teaching AI is guided by the principle that it should augment human intelligence. We train students to integrate AI into their work, not to become AI technicians. We want to foster a generation of leaders who can make trade-offs and decisions by combining different objectives and perspectives, short as well as long term view, organizational and societal impact as well as financial performance.

That starts with learning how to use AI well. Students learn how to write effective prompts, understand how AI systems produce answers, and identify hallucinations or biased outputs. They also learn to decide when AI can support their work, and when they need to reason independently. To date, around 9,000 NEOMA students have received AI training. The objective is to help them use AI with discernment and remain accountable for the decisions it informs.

We complement this technical training with philosophy and literature, which help students reflect on leadership, responsibility and judgment. In a course for first-year students in our Master in Management program, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein becomes a case study in innovation. The novel raises a strikingly contemporary question: when a creation begins to act beyond its creator’s control, where does responsibility lie? With the creature, with Victor Frankenstein, who brought it to life and then abandoned it, or with both? Applied to AI, the lesson is not that innovation should be feared. It is that those who design, deploy and use powerful technologies cannot walk away from their consequences. Future leaders must learn to anticipate those consequences and remain accountable for the systems they put into the world.

That question is no longer confined to the classroom. It has become practical as AI moves into the workplace, especially at the beginning of a career, when experience is built through tasks that technology can now perform.

THE FIRST RUNG OF A CAREER LADDER

AI is not only changing the work people do after they gain experience. It is changing how they gain that experience in the first place. Entry-level analysts once have traditionally learned by gathering information, checking assumptions and preparing first drafts. Some of those tasks can now be automated.

These tasks are not simply routine work. They are how young professionals learn to recognize inconsistencies, understand how an organization operates and build the confidence to make decisions. They are also how future managers acquire the experience they will later need to guide others. If they disappear without being replaced, companies may gain short-term efficiency while weakening their own pipeline of future leaders.

This is not an argument for preserving outdated jobs. It is a call to redesign them. Young employees should work with AI, but they should also be required to explain their assumptions, verify its output, defend their recommendations and take responsibility for the decisions that follow. Employers and business schools must work together to ensure that the first job remains a place where judgement is developed, not simply a set of tasks waiting to be automated.

CONNECTING EMPLOYERS AND A CHANGING GENERATION

Business schools see how employers’ priorities and young people’s attitudes to work are evolving in real time. Few institutions have that simultaneous view.

Companies increasingly ask us how they can attract, understand and retain younger talent. Students, meanwhile, want to know which skills will remain valuable as AI transforms entry-level work. Because business schools handle both questions, we can help each side understand the other, and translate those expectations into curricula, career guidance and workplace practices.

WHAT GEN Z EXPECTS FROM WORK

According to Deloitte’s 2026 Global Gen Z and Millennial Survey, only 6% of Gen Z respondents consider reaching a leadership position their primary career goal. Yet 76% remain interested in pursuing senior leadership at some point. Their ambition has not disappeared. They are approaching progress on a different timetable, with greater attention to learning, stability and well-being.

These are global figures, and they are not evenly spread: interest in senior leadership ranges from roughly three-quarters worldwide to near-universal in a market like India. The number to trust is the direction, not the decimal. Across markets, students are rethinking the demands and responsibilities of leadership, not whether it is worth having a leadership position.

This search for meaning and fulfillment goes hand in hand with a growing concern for mental health. The generation now entering higher education and the workforce has come of age amid constant connectivity, a succession of crises, and performance pressures of a rarely matched intensity. They expect institutions to acknowledge this reality rather than treat it as something outside the scope of education.

Rankings still matter, but students increasingly ask an additional question: what will I be able to learn, build and become in that job / in that company? Our role during their studies is to help them explore further these questions, widen their horizons, and let them test different paths.

A CENTRAL ROLE IN A CHANGING LABOR MARKET

Business schools cannot predict every job that AI will transform. But they can help employers and students adapt together. This means listening to both, translating changing expectations into education and career guidance, and ensuring that young people develop the judgment required to use AI responsibly. In a labor market moving this quickly, connecting education and employment has become central to the mission of business schools.

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Delphine Manceau is the Dean of Neoma Business School in France. She holds a Ph.D. from HEC Paris and was a senior research fellow at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania. Manceau is member of the EQUIS Committee, and was Chair of the European Advisory Council of AACSB from 2018 to 2020.

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