Harvard Business Impact Launches Advisor, An AI Assistant Built To Give Faculty Back Their Prep Time

For most business school professors, the hours spent in front of a class are only a fraction of the job. Before any discussion starts, there’s the work of finding the right case, sequencing a syllabus, building a discussion plan and adapting all of it to a particular group of students.

Harvard Business Impact wants to take a big chunk of that work off faculty plates. Today (November 4), the organization launches Advisor, an AI-powered assistant that recommends course materials, explains why each one fits and, for many case studies, generates a customized teaching plan.

“Faculty’s most precious resource is time, and Advisor gives it back to them,” says Ellen Desmarais, president of Harvard Business Publishing, in written responses to Poets&Quants.

HOW ADVISOR WORKS

Many faculty will know Harvard Business Impact by a former name, Harvard Business Publishing Education. HBI is the brand Harvard Business Publishing adopted in June 2025 for its Education and Corporate Learning units – the arms that provide cases, simulations, and other teaching materials to schools and run leadership development programs for companies. Harvard Business Publishing, a not-for-profit affiliate of Harvard Business School founded in 1994, remains the parent organization of both Harvard Business Impact and Harvard Business Review.

At the time of its 2025 rebrand, Harvard Business Impact had a presence in more than 75 countries and served more than 300 corporate clients and over 4,000 educational institutions. Its education catalog includes more than 70,000 course materials – case studies, simulations, articles, and online courses – from more than 70 sources, along with teaching resources and guidance on how to use them. Advisor is built on top of that catalog.

Educators start by describing their learning objectives, course details such as level and class time, and their teaching preferences. Advisor returns a shortlist of recommended materials, along with the reasoning behind each pick. According to the announcement, those explanations cover factors such as topic specificity, class time, teaching style and course level.

For many of the case studies in its catalog, Advisor can also produce a full teaching plan, including discussion and board plans, in-class activities, key takeaways and classroom management strategies.

“High-quality courses depend on strong course materials and thoughtful teaching plans, but identifying the right material and tailoring those plans to a specific class is often where preparation becomes challenging and time consuming,” Desmarais says in the announcement. “Advisor makes that substantial preparation easier, so faculty can devote more of their expertise to facilitating memorable learning for students.”

NOT A GENERAL-PURPOSE CHATBOT

Advisor lives directly on the Harvard Business Impact website, where Desmarais says educators from more than 4,000 institutions around the world already find course materials. The company says the tool learns from each user’s courses, needs and preferences over time, so its recommendations become more relevant with continued use. Educators can get started at hbsp.harvard.edu/advisor. The announcement doesn’t say what Advisor costs or how access works for schools and individual faculty.

Desmarais is careful to distinguish Advisor from the general AI tools many faculty already use. Its guidance draws on the organization’s catalog of cases, simulations, multimedia and AI-integrated tools, each vetted against Harvard Business Impact’s standards.

“Unlike general-purpose AI tools, Advisor is grounded in Harvard Business Impact’s curated catalog and pedagogical frameworks, trained on the teaching notes and academic material behind the catalog, and operates within guardrails set by our editors,” she says.

That grounding matters because, as she puts it, there is no one-size-fits-all approach to teaching. Harvard Business Impact serves educators from undergraduate programs through executive education, and material that works in one classroom can fall flat in another. Advisor is designed to account for that range, shaping its plans around classroom setup, education level and discipline.

HOW SUCCESS WILL BE MEASURED

For now, the yardstick is the faculty experience. Desmarais says the questions that matter are whether Advisor saves educators time, builds their confidence and improves their teaching practices.

“The early test is whether Advisor helps educators move from finding the right materials to having a specialized teaching plan built for their class, so they walk into the classroom better prepared to lead richer discussions and create more impactful learning experiences,” she says.

She acknowledges the product is in its early stages, and that feedback from educators and institutions will shape how it develops. The company says today’s version focuses on finding material and building teaching plans, but that Advisor is designed to expand over time.

WHAT CHANGES IN THE CLASSROOM

Desmarais frames the launch against a broader shift in how faculty think about AI. Among educators, she says, the debate has moved from whether to use AI to how to use it well – and whether the tools actually improve teaching and learning.

She expects tools like Advisor to absorb more of the discovery and preparation that eat up faculty time, freeing professors to focus on running challenging discussions, pushing students to think deeply and linking classroom work to the real world. Whether that happens, she adds, depends on how well faculty are supported. She points to a July report from Inside Higher Ed, produced with AACSB International, the Graduate Management Admission Council and the Graduate Business Curriculum Roundtable: Drawing on 84 participating business schools, it found faculty development to be the top factor separating successful AI adoption from stalled rollouts. Harvard Business Impact says it will back Advisor with training, tools and ongoing support for educators.

She also sees the purpose of the classroom itself changing. “As AI puts knowledge within everyone’s reach, the classroom’s job is shifting from delivering knowledge to building judgment and critical reasoning,” she says. “What sets leaders apart is no longer what they know, but the quality of the questions they ask and what they do with the answers.”

‘THE EDUCATOR MAKES THE FINAL CALL’

That thinking also drives Harvard Business Impact’s Essential Skill Suites, a separate offering that combines quick cases, simulations and an online course to give students repeated practice in skills such as collaboration, integrity and navigating uncertainty. Advisor, she says, supports the faculty side of the same shift.

For all the automation, Desmarais says faculty expertise stays at the center.

“AI helps with the groundwork, recommending materials and drafting customized teaching plans, but faculty read the room, know when to push a student further, and bring the context, challenge, and judgment that no technology can,” she says. “Harvard Business Impact’s Advisor is built with that in mind: it offers options and explains its reasoning, but the educator makes the final call.”

Learn more about Harvard Business Impact’s Advisor, and register for free to use it, here.

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