As artificial intelligence transforms how organisations innovate and make decisions, Europe’s business schools are competing to equip students with the skills employers say will define future careers: agility, ethical judgment and the ability to work intelligently with AI. The goal is not merely to understand artificial intelligence, but to learn how to lead with it.
It is a challenge companies are already confronting. When executives at French pharmaceutical group Sanofi were asked to use AI to improve its innovation pipeline, for example, they turned not to consultants but to HEC Paris. The business school’s faculty designed a leadership programme in which participants worked with AI coaches — virtual assistants trained on company data — to generate and test new ideas.
More than 500 innovation projects emerged, including one that could cut clinical trial review cycles from 11 to three. “Removing such a bottleneck could be a gain of tremendous value both economically and for patients,” says Emmanuel Coblence, HEC’s dean of pedagogy.
The principle of learning to work with intelligent systems is reshaping business education and the skills graduates will need to thrive. The 2025 Graduate Management Admission Council Corporate Recruiters Survey found that nearly a third of global recruiters said that knowledge of using AI tools was important to their hiring of general management graduates, up 5 percentage points on last year.
