Poets&Quants’ 2026 Best In Class Awards: Stanford GSB, Artificial Intelligence

Stanford GSB Dean Sarah Soule:

No business school sits closer to the AI revolution than Stanford, and none has leaned in harder. Its Graduate School of Business has woven the technology through its teaching, research, and daily operations, which is why it earns Poets&Quants‘ 2026 Best in Class Award for Artificial Intelligence. 

What makes the story unusual is the person steering it: Sarah Soule, who a year ago became the school’s 11th dean and the first woman to hold the job, and whose own scholarship is the study of how organizations and movements change.

That background shapes how she is approaching the biggest change the GSB has seen in years, and in its centennial year. 

“Change has to be both bottoms-up and top-down,” Soule tells P&Q. “This is a school where it would probably not work so well to come in as the new dean and say, okay, everybody, let’s mandate change. I see my role as creating the conditions for change.” Her method, she says, is “setting the conditions, telling the stories, and ginning up a lot of excitement so that it kind of diffuses on its own.”

INTO THE FABRIC

A year in, Soule argues, the responsible use of AI is “becoming part of the fabric of everything that we’re doing” – teaching, research, and the school’s own operations. The student-led AI@GSB initiative packed a sold-out auditorium for its first event of the year. Staff have launched an AI community of practice to swap tools. And a Stanford enterprise agreement with Anthropic, she says, is helping faculty and staff get comfortable using the technology in their work.

That is what she means when she says AI is becoming part of the school’s DNA. 

“It’s not just this little thing that a couple of people are playing around with, noodling with,” she says. “It becomes so baked into the research and teaching missions of the school.” 

The examples run from the ambitious to the everyday: Stanford social scientist Jennifer Eberhardt is using AI to analyze police body-camera footage at a scale that, Soule says, “even with an army of student researchers, she wouldn’t be able to do” by hand; Stanford Seed rebuilt how participants across Indonesia, India, and Sub-Saharan Africa engage with its coursework, translating materials into students’ native languages.

SOMETHING IN THE WATER?

Every business school now talks about AI. Few can do what Stanford does with its zip code. “There’s always been a porous boundary between Silicon Valley and Stanford – by design, in fact,” Soule says, and in the current moment that porosity is the whole game. “This is overused, but there really is something in the water.”

She is working to convert proximity into advantage in both directions. Two faculty are currently on leave at Anthropic while still advising their PhD students on campus; more than 30 alumni work at the company, and recently hosted Soule and one of those faculty members for a roundtable on what the school should be teaching. Interns flow the other way. 

“There’s a nice flywheel effect,” she says. “They see how talented our students are, and then they want to hire more of our students.”

RIGOR, RELEVANCE & REASON

For all the enthusiasm, Soule is wary of a school that trains only in tools. “As everybody gets so excited about what AI can do, we need to double down on the human skills,” she says – creativity, courage, and the much-abused word she keeps returning to, judgment. She traces the GSB’s identity to a formula a 1960s dean, Ernest Arbuckle, called rigor and relevance, and says she is now adding a third term. “I’m adding reason as well – reason, or judgment and discernment.”

It is also what she would tell students tempted to chase the shiny tools. “We’re not training you just in these great tools,” she says. “Those tools will help you in your first job. But we’re training you for your job 10 years from now, when you’re leading an organization and you have to make difficult decisions.”

If there is any worry that AI enthusiasm has cooled, the demand says otherwise. Huggy Rao’s AI course drew a wait list of 67 students before the school found a bigger room; a View From The Top talk by OpenAI’s Sam Altman sold out in two minutes. “This is the moment,” Soule says.

Her biggest concern, fittingly, doubles as her biggest hope. As fears about AI mount and calls for regulation grow, she argues, universities should step into the gap. “We can be neutral conveners between government and policymakers and the companies building these models,” she says. “I’m concerned, but I’m also optimistic about the role of not just Stanford, but universities.”

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