AI Is Leverage, Not A Strategy: Maryland Smith’s Dean On Rebuilding The MBA

Prabhudev Konana pulls out his laptop mid-sentence and scrolls back to a slide he says he built years ago, for a machine-learning course he taught long before AI became a boardroom obsession. The slide poses one question: what makes a human, human?

The dean of the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business runs through the list he built for students back then – sight, hearing, now touch, even smell, all things he says AI can now approximate – before landing on the harder ones: anger, lust, empathy, a sense of self. Then comes the question that’s stuck with him since: if AI systems get convincing enough to appear conscious, what happens when one causes harm but can’t feel the consequences?

“What if,” he says, “they start to have pain?” 

It’s the kind of tangent Konana takes often, and happily. He talks with the enthusiasm of a longtime teacher who still lights up at his own material, jumping from a decade-old lecture slide to the next decade and back without losing the thread – animated and engaging in a way that makes even a recap of a five-year-old strategic plan sound like it’s still unfolding in real time.

Last month, that enthusiasm landed in the Bay Area. Konana flew in to open a West Coast swing meant to connect with alumni and industry leaders, a trip that would carry him from Palo Alto to Los Angeles, where a Smith MBA grad now serves as CFO of Paramount, and on to San Diego, where another alum now works at Qualcomm. He’d just been reappointed to lead Smith through June 2031, and he had a lot of ground to cover.

A STRATEGIC PLAN WRITTEN BEFORE THE CRISIS HIT

Konana arrived at Maryland from the University of Texas at Austin’s McCombs School of Business in January 2021, after 26 years there, where he’d built the school’s first M.S. in business analytics program and helped push its faculty through the pandemic-era shift to synchronous online teaching. He says he came to College Park believing the MBA market – outside a handful of elite programs – was already under stress, and that undergraduate demand, not the graduate degree, would be where growth actually showed up.

“If you build any program on the backs of international students,” he says, “it’s just a matter of time.”

It was an early, unwelcome message for a school that – like many public flagships – had leaned on international enrollment to backfill MBA classrooms. So one of Konana’s first moves was a strategic plan meant to get ahead of forces he saw coming well before generative AI made “disruption” a boardroom cliché: online MBA programs undercutting Smith on price (he points to Boston University’s roughly $28,000 online MBA as an example of where the market was heading), tuition levels that put Smith at a disadvantage against peers like Georgia Tech, and a hybrid-learning shift driven by working students who, as he puts it, “don’t want to quit their jobs” to get a degree.

The response was to “undo” some of what the school had been doing and rebuild its master’s, MBA and undergraduate programs largely from scratch – while negotiating down tuition in some master’s programs, a harder lift, he notes, at a public institution than it would be at a private one.

‘BUSINESS IS EVERYBODY’S BUSINESS’

The branding line Konana keeps returning to was chosen, he says, to push business education out of its own silo and across the Maryland campus. The undergraduate program has become the school’s growth engine. Demand is so high, Konana says, that Smith “could grow by 50 percent” and still not meet it.

Much of his first term went into building programs that connect business training to other disciplines: engineering, journalism, architecture, agriculture and, most recently, the space and quantum-computing industries.

The school’s Space at Smith initiative, launched in 2025, produced its first undergraduate course – an industry analysis of space commerce – last spring, timed to coincide with NASA’s Artemis II mission. A parallel push into “business of quantum” is now in the works, Konana says, pointing to College Park’s proximity to IonQ, the quantum-computing company headquartered a few miles from campus, and to Microsoft’s investments in the sector, as reasons the school is positioning itself there early rather than playing catch-up later.

Other additions from the past several years, by his account: a business-of-journalism partnership with Maryland’s Merrill College of Journalism that now brings in dozens of small, independent news outlets for regular programming, a hedge, he argues, against the collapse of local news; a Strategy Design Fellows program pairing business students with college athletes on personal-branding and monetization questions; an interdisciplinary business honors track; and real-estate finance and agriculture-focused fellows programs built with Maryland’s architecture and agriculture schools.

A wealth-management program is launching with backing from a still-unnamed major donor whose daughter went through the school. The business minor has grown from roughly 450 to nearly 1,500 students in four years, Konana says, and a “plus-one” pathway letting undergraduates in any major roll into a Smith master’s has roughly quadrupled in size, to about 200 students.

The MBA itself was restructured into one-year and two-year tracks. Without a built-in internship, Konana says, the one-year option leans on four “experiential learning” projects with real companies – among them a project for the Baltimore Chamber of Commerce on monetizing a planned expansion to the city’s convention center.

On international enrollment, Konana is candid that the picture has gotten harder – not just because of federal policy and funding uncertainty, but because of the underlying economics facing international students themselves.

“If they can’t get a job,” he says, “they can’t pay back those loans.”

He argues the school won’t keep marketing international pathways it can’t back up with realistic job outcomes in the current climate, and says he’s waiting to see whether U.S. policy on international students eventually swings back.

AI AS LEVERAGE, NOT A STRATEGY

On artificial intelligence, Konana is pointedly resistant to positioning Smith as an “AI-first” school, a label he says some competitors have adopted.

“We strongly believe in human-first,” he says.

He frames AI instead as something closer to financial leverage – capable of massive upside when used well, and equally capable of producing a 2008-style collapse when deployed without governance or an understanding of second- and third-order effects.

That philosophy has shown up concretely on campus. Every incoming MBA student went through a two-day AI bootcamp the weekend before this interview, building working applications without writing code. The school has assigned “AI fellows” within each academic area to train other faculty, and Konana says the shift is visibly changing how professors teach and assess students – oral presentations and applied problem sets increasingly replacing the traditional case write-up.

Much of that effort runs through the school’s Center for AI in Business, led by associate dean Balaji Padmanabhan, which last year turned a pilot program teaching AI adoption to more than 50 small businesses in Prince George’s County into a $1.031 million federal grant – championed by U.S. Rep. Glenn Ivey (D-Md.) – to expand the initiative statewide. Konana points to it as a model for the kind of applied, revenue-relevant AI work he wants the school known for, distinct from more abstract research questions.

“We are not talking about big problems like cancer solutions,” he says. “We are talking about how you build solutions” for the businesses that make up most of the economy.

He’s also been recruiting faculty specifically for this moment. Finance professor Tania Babina joined from Columbia Business School with a research focus on AI’s economic impact on firms and labor; marketing professor Dan McCarthy arrived from Emory after selling his customer-analytics company, Zodiac, to Nike in 2018; and Michael Faulkender, the school’s Dean’s Professor of Finance, returned to the faculty after stepping down as U.S. Deputy Treasury Secretary.

They join a bench Konana argues has been quietly strong for decades: marketing professor Roland Rust, co-author of The Feeling Economy; finance professors Albert “Pete” Kyle and Steven Heston, both of whom have market-microstructure and options-pricing models named after them; strategy professor Anil Gupta, who recently argued in a Wall Street Journal op-ed that AI is a general-purpose technology no single firm can monopolize; and Evan Starr, whose research on noncompete agreements has been cited in congressional testimony and FTC rulemaking. The school also claims one of the country’s first student-managed investment funds and a center for entrepreneurship dating to the 1990s, along with a doctoral program Konana calls unusually strong for a school its size.

“We always led with faculty,” he says. “We were never bringing them in – it’s always outflow.”

‘IF I SAY RANKINGS DON’T MATTER, I’M LYING’

So the question seemed worth putting to him directly: for a school with that track record, why isn’t Maryland Smith mentioned in the same breath as Georgetown or the rest of the region’s top-25 programs? Konana doesn’t have a clean answer.

“I don’t know,” he says. “You should be in the same conversation as Georgetown and the other top schools.”

He doesn’t pretend rankings are beneath him, either.

“They do matter to people,” he says. “If I say rankings don’t matter, I’m lying.”

But he’s blunt about what he sees as the metrics’ distortions – starting with compensation data that isn’t normalized for geography, which he argues systematically penalizes schools that place graduates into nonprofits, government or think tanks in Washington, D.C., rather than Wall Street.

“Our incentive is, how do I get more students to Wall Street?” he says. “But does it mean other areas are less important?”

His sharper critique is aimed at research metrics – what he calls “count metrics,” the citation- and publication-counting he argues has pushed academia toward gaming its own incentives, mentioning a Nature article on how to buy authorship. The Smith School, he says, is trying to shift internally toward measuring research by real-world impact rather than volume – pointing to Faulkender’s congressional testimony and Starr’s influence on noncompete policy as the kind of work he’d rather reward than a faculty member’s raw paper count.

“It’s how do you convey to the market who you are,” he says. “I think for a while, we forgot that.”

WHAT HE WANTS FROM SILICON VALLEY

The occasion for the conversation was itself instructive. Konana says what he hoped to hear from tech-industry alumni and leaders on the trip wasn’t curriculum feedback so much as insight into navigating regulation and government relations – a skill he thinks MBA programs underweight.

“How do you deal with negotiating with the government and powerful people?” he says. “You can’t ignore that.”

He closed, as he often does, by reaching for a longer horizon: a business history course a Smith faculty member is developing around capitalism, creative destruction and economic mobility. Konana lit up describing it, then admitted where his own loyalties still sit.

“If I had to step down as a dean today,” he says, “I would like to teach that.”

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