The BLoC interview. ‘MBAs can be change agents who help firms bridge the knowledge gap’

One of the big advantages of being a new B-school is that one can be agile and change the curriculum more than any of the existing schools. I’ve worked in academia for the last 25 years and I got my PhD from one of the oldest private schools. And then I worked in the oldest public school in the US. While there’s tremendous amount of legacy in all of these institutions, academia unfortunately can be resistant when it comes to being able to change.

And right now we are living in very interesting times. The impact of AI and digitisation on businesses is unprecedented. Some people call this the fourth industrial revolution, and that is not an exaggeration. The fact that technology is completely upending the way we work and change our lives is quite clear.

When we step back and look at it from a B-school perspective, it offers an enormous amount of opportunities to train our students so that they understand this new dimension. What we aspire to do is to be able to get our students exposed to the problems and the challenges that AI poses as well as the different opportunities.

In that sense, we are truly a new age school because we are focused on the latest technology and we are also part of the BITS Pilani system and we have strong technology folks in our backyard, which most of the typical MBA schools cannot claim. So we are essentially marrying tech from the BITS Pilani computer science system, the AI group, along with getting folks from industry and building a curriculum.

In March, we are planning to have an AI immersion month. The first week will be focused on AI in Finance, second week on AI in HR, AI in Operations, AI in marketing and the goal is to provide the students with an experiential component to the learning. We are going to get people from the industry and have the students get hands-on experience going through this. We want to be recognised as a school that trains the MBA students best when it comes to AI. That is something that I care deeply about and we are moving in the direction and the fact that we are a small school means that we can make these rapid changes.

Not at all, in fact, it could actually be quite the contrary. So there are two elements that are actually acting at this point. On one hand, AI is indeed making the MBA programme more technical. At the same time if you look under the wraps you find that AI is actually making even the non-technical people use technical products.

Even three or four years back, we would expect anybody in the data science world to understand technical languages like Python or R but right now we are in this low code, no code world where you could actually use Chat GPT and one can actually do many of the technical stuff without being technical themselves.

The thing that most organisations both within India as well as abroad are struggling with is how do you move the entire organisation which is used to the way of gut-based, intuition-based decision making to a more AI world and leverage all of the data and make better decisions. And that requires not just technical skills, but it also requires the entire organisation to think very differently. It requires a deep cultural change and this can’t be done by having more technical people, whether with an MBA background or without.

That’s a very important emphasis that we have within the school — being in touch with industry, as at the end of the day they are our clients. Our students want to be placed in the best companies out there and it’s critical for us to be in touch with the industry

Now having said that, there’s something very interesting that has happened which I haven’t seen in the last 25 years. Till about 2-3 years ago, when the companies would come to the universities to recruit, they were largely looking for people to come and fill in the positions that were already there.

So an FMCG company might actually go to an MBA school and say I need a marketing person as somebody left the company or someone got promoted. So essentially they were plugging and playing the MBA students.

Now what is happening is very interesting because organisations don’t really know which direction this AI is going. In fact, they’re actually coming to the universities and saying: please can you train us on how to manage AI in the organisation, which as a researcher and as a faculty I am actually quite excited about because what typically business schools have done, which is write case studies about companies and then teaching to students, we are in a position where we can truly lead the companies.

We can tell the companies how to go about managing AI, how to manage data and the way we do that is through different means. One is of course through direct interaction with the industry and the other thing is by training our students who will themselves become the missionaries who will go into those companies and be agents of change.

One of the interesting things that I’ve observed, even before AI, is we would teach our MBA students all the core topics like finance and operations and all of that.

Earlier, when our students go for internship they’ll come back and say that their managers were most impressed by like something as simple as an Excel skill that they learn!

We are seeing the same thing happening with Chat GPT. It’s an easy tool. All of us can go there and punch in the questions, but the ones who are really trained in it know how to use it way better than the folks who playing around with Chat GPT.

One of the things we’re doing is we have prompt engineering as a class.

That’s where one of the big advantages of BITSoM lies. Because we want to be this global B-school and we want to get global level education into our classrooms, we have a visiting faculty model. We do have some resident faculty but largely our faculty fly in from all over the world to come and teach our students. That means, every year we can actually pick the best faculty out there, those who are doing cutting edge research.

I’m an operations professor and I believe in continuous improvement. So I believe that every single year we need to keep on improving and so there are a bunch of different changes that we made in the curriculum already. We have introduced new classes in finance, accounting, statistics, operations. Then we have a class on prompt engineering and there’s this whole one month of immersion in AI, an experiential learning component that is going to be new and on top of that we also have a global immersion experience. Our students typically have gone to London Business School in the past, so this year, along with the LBS, we are also considering another option which is in Monterrey, Mexico. Mexico is very interesting because in the US there’s a lot of nearshoring happening. The US is bringing all the manufacturing closer to and Monterrey is where a lot of the supply chains are actually flowing through.

So we are trying to build a relationship with them so that our students can actually fly to Mexico and visit those factories in Monterrey and see how the global supply chains are operating.

So, I would say yes, indeed, the curriculum is being adapted to not only have new courses that build on build on the rigour, but also new courses on the experiential side as well as on the global immersion stage. And on top of that, we are, at the end of this year, having a massive curriculum review. It’s been three years since we launched so we want to review it and then figure out what are the some of the bigger changes that we will do which should come into play from the following year.

The MBA education is, because of AI and some of the big changes, more relevant now than probably, I would say 10 years back. And especially it is critical for students to come to the classroom because MBA education is not just about technical skills.

In fact, to be honest, the masters in engineering students will have better technical skills than MBA students. So what is critical for the MBA students is to be like the change agents, people who can go into companies and help the companies evolve and keep changing on a day to day basis. This requires working with people, influencing the key decision makers. One has come to the classroom, work in teams, talk to the faculty members, and so essentially the classroom becomes a laboratory for them to learn the skills that they will go back and employ in the workplace. So it’s a bit hard for me to really imagine how just purely through online education one can acquire the skills required for an MBA. Now there are other programmes where I think online degrees is probably good, but for an MBA I think classroom education is something that I would still throw my weight behind.