Is The MBA Still Worth It In The Age Of AI? 2 Students And A Trove Of Coaching Data Say Yes – With Caveats

If artificial intelligence is coming for the MBA, the people applying for one haven’t gotten the memo.

New data from Leland, the admissions and career coaching platform, shared exclusively with Poets&Quants, suggests AI has done little to shake applicants’ faith in the degree. What it has changed is why they want it and what they need help with. Mentions of AI in Leland coaching interactions rose 28-fold over two years and fivefold in the past year alone, according to the company, which says its coaches have worked with tens of thousands of MBA applicants in recent years. (The 28x figure covers all Leland coaching categories, not only MBA.)

But in those conversations, Leland says, applicants question an MBA’s price and logistics – cost and, for international candidates, visas – rather than whether the degree is worth having. Many say they want it not to escape AI but to move into it: into AI strategy, AI policy and roles at AI companies.

Two recent Leland-connected MBAs illustrate the point. One is a data scientist two weeks into Chicago Booth’s Evening MBA who argues that AI will commoditize coding and that business skills are what will set technologists apart. The other is a former investment banker who used Kellogg’s One-Year MBA as what he calls a sandbox for breaking into AI startups. Both say the degree is worth it. Both also say it depends heavily on how – and how fast – you do it.

WHAT THE DATA SHOWS

Leland’s numbers draw on three sources: a count of AI mentions across its coaching interactions over the two years ending June 2026; an analysis of more than 750 interactions with MBA applicants in July 2026; and a 2025 survey of its community that included 105 MBA students and graduates.

The most common worry among applicants isn’t AI. It’s “I can’t find my story,” according to Leland. About one in three fear a single weak number, such as a test score or GPA, will disqualify them. And a newer concern has emerged: essays drafted with AI that read as generic.

Leland’s coaches say applicants regularly ask whether they should use ChatGPT. The advice is to use it for editing and feedback but keep the story and voice their own. One applicant in financial services, applying this cycle, says she used AI only to check grammar and pressure-test her drafts – and wants the MBA for management skills and peer influence.

Others frame the degree as a hedge. One applicant, unsure whether he would keep his job, says business school gives him “some level of optionality.” But cost looms large. “The only thing stopping me from pulling the trigger,” another tells his coach, “is the price.”

Many see the MBA as a way into AI rather than away from it. Leland’s applicant profiles include a healthcare banker applying to HBS, Stanford GSB and Wharton to move into the overlap of AI and healthcare; a computer science senior with a full-time big tech offer who wants a path into AI policy or strategy; and a current M7 student who took an AI internship over private equity.

Some say their programs haven’t kept up. One current MBA student says his program covers AI strategy and governance but not how to build with AI, so he took separate AI courses to fill the gap.

‘AI WILL COMMODITIZE CODING’

Shantnu Gupta doesn’t lack technical credentials: He already holds a master’s in data science from Georgia State University and works full-time in analytics and AI engineering at Elevance Health, one of the country’s largest health insurers. About three years ago, he says, his team deployed large language models to deliver personalized recommendations to users, making it one of the first in health insurance to do so. Today he works on dental claims analytics and is building a proof of concept that uses the OpenAI API to summarize claims, which he will present to a vice president who reports to the company’s chief operating officer.

So why an MBA rather than another technical degree?

“AI will commoditize coding,” Gupta tells P&Q. “Unless you’re in the top 0.1% – those AI researchers getting packages worth hundreds of millions of dollars – everyone will be able to do it.” He points to a Booth classmate on the investing side who built and deployed a fully functional website, backend and all.

What AI can’t do, Gupta argues, is close the gap between what executives think the technology can do and what it can actually deliver – especially in healthcare.

“Most senior leadership is using AI, and they don’t know the technicalities,” he says. “They think AI can do everything – it’s the Superman of technologies. They get inspiration from Anthropic and OpenAI demos, which are done in very idealistic scenarios. Healthcare is not like that. It’s the most regulated industry, more than finance, because we have everyone’s health data.”

That gap is where Gupta sees his opening. Technologists, he says, often stall out. “Most people in tech get stuck at the lead position for a long time – seven or eight years. I want to go into tech strategy or product and take the next step.”

WHY BOOTH, AND WHY PART-TIME

Gupta was admitted to both Booth and Kellogg. Booth won, partly on speed: he says he submitted his application on a Sunday night, had an interview invitation by 10 a.m. Monday, interviewed that week and had an admit within about four days, along with a $40,000 scholarship – rare for a part-time program. Booth’s quantitative reputation, and the tradition of economists like Milton Friedman and Richard Thaler, sealed the deal.

Staying in his job was never in question. His family is in Chicago, and he isn’t attempting a hard pivot. He is targeting tech strategy and product analytics, and he says his current salary already sits near Booth’s post-MBA median. His goal is acceleration: he expects to earn about 1.5 times his current pay within two to three years.

His coursework so far – microeconomics and a course on persuasive narratives – is deliberately non-technical. Next term he plans to add business statistics and an AI-in-finance elective.

WHO AI LEAVES BEHIND

Asked whether AI will hollow out the MBA by automating the analytical work B-schools teach, Gupta draws a line between who’s at risk and who isn’t.

“It can hollow it out for people who don’t have a tech background and are trying to move into product,” he says. “But people with a good tech background will have an extra advantage. Claude can do a lot of analytics, but you need someone who understands the code, can do the systems analysis, and can also present it.”

He credits a mentor, a former chief product officer at his company, with pushing him toward the degree. The argument was simple: at senior levels, even engineers are selling. 

“If I become a director, even in engineering, indirectly I have to do sales,” Gupta says. “Even if you’re a core computer science guy, even if you have a PhD, at the end of the day you have to sell yourself and your product.”

The market is already responding, he says. Simply adding Booth to his résumé has produced job interviews, including for forward-deployed engineer roles outside Chicago that he can’t take.

THE 1-YEAR SANDBOX

Cody Duy Nguyen took a different route to a similar conclusion.

Nguyen, who completed Kellogg’s One-Year MBA this year, describes his career as “nonlinear from the start.” He earned his undergraduate degree in education and worked as a student teacher before deciding he could have greater impact by leading organizations. With no business background, he spent two years as an investment banking analyst, then moved to a strategy and investments role at a big tech company.

By most measures, he already had a “post-MBA” career. What he wanted was something big tech couldn’t offer.

“I wanted to actually build a company – not just transform a company or help it innovate, but build one from the early growth stages, especially in the age of AI,” Nguyen tells P&Q.

He also wanted room to experiment with AI tools in a way his job didn’t allow. “Depending on the seat you’re in, you’re not really given the full space to use the tools,” he says. Some companies are cautious about secure, trustworthy AI and slow to adopt; others simply consume all your time.

Nguyen had conversations with startups about jumping straight in, and he acknowledges plenty of people make that move without an MBA. But the application process itself, he says, clarified why he wanted the degree: “I wanted to be in the sandbox” – to build skills in sales, product, marketing, entrepreneurship and negotiation. “You don’t always get to develop those sitting behind a screen iterating on financial models and slides.”

A QUARTER IN SAN FRANCISCO

A major draw was Kellogg’s San Francisco winter quarter, which let students arrange their own placements at startups or venture firms. Nguyen says he was in the program’s final cohort.

He used it to land a go-to-market internship at a Series A startup building AI agents that search, browse and operate on the live web. “I wanted to get as close to the zero-to-one build as possible,” he says – something he had no exposure to in big tech. Both of his AI startup experiences during the year came through Kellogg alumni.

That network, he says, is strong at any top school because alumni are everywhere. What sets Kellogg apart is how responsive they are: “It’s part of the culture – a higher empathy, higher EQ ethos to lift each other up.” But he didn’t limit himself to Kellogg grads, also reaching out to MBAs from other schools who had made the same jump from banking or consulting into startups.

As for whether the classroom kept pace with AI, Nguyen credits Kellogg professor Sébastien Martin. New AI tools arrived faster than Martin’s own syllabus could keep up, he says, but Martin pushed students to pick them up anyway and build. Nguyen says the professor cared more about students fully embracing AI than about keeping them inside the lines.

THE ROI MATH

For Nguyen, the one-year format was decisive. He is the first in his family to graduate from college; his father came to the U.S. from Vietnam as a teenager without a high school diploma and built a business from scratch.

“If the two-year option was the only program open, I don’t know if I would have gone through the application process,” he says. “It’s a long time in this kind of environment. It’s a lot of debt.” For someone already coming from banking and big tech, he says, the one-year program delivered “the benefits of a top-tier MBA at half the cost.”

That calculus echoes Leland’s survey data. Among 105 MBA students and graduates in Leland’s 2025 career survey, 86% spent money on their applications. The median respondent spent about $1,000 and 100 hours applying, and expects the degree to raise their pay by $50,000. The sample is small and drawn from Leland’s own community, but the direction is clear: applicants are investing real money and time, and they expect a return.

‘YOU HAVE TO BE REALLY INTENTIONAL’

Leland’s coaches say AI has made applications easier to polish and harder to stand out in. 

“ChatGPT, Claude, Gemini, none of them can help you with finding your why,” says one Leland coach who previously worked in Chicago Booth admissions, during a session on the “Why MBA” essay. According to Leland, Harvard Business School, Kellogg, Michigan Ross and London Business School now ask applicants to disclose how they used AI in their applications.

Both the men who spoke with P&Q say the “why” is exactly what made the degree pay off. Nguyen says he never needed the MBA – which is precisely why he pushed so hard once he was in it.

“I knew I didn’t need the MBA,” he says. “That’s why I wanted to run at a very fast pace once I was in it, because I needed to make it worthwhile.”

The MBA, he adds, isn’t something you can coast through the way some students may have decades ago. “You have to be really, really intentional with how you use it.”

Leland connected P&Q with the students interviewed for this story.

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