‘The MBA model will remain the same. The content will change’: IIM Ahmedabad director

As artificial intelligence (AI) reshapes organisations and the skills they demand, management education must evolve to keep pace, said professor Bharat Bhasker, director, Indian Institute of Management, Ahmedabad. In an interview with ET’s Sreeradha Basu, he discussed the institute’s new executive MBA in Dubai, the growing need for AI-savvy leaders and how business schools must prepare managers for a changing workplace. Edited excerpts:

IIM Ahmedabad is expanding its Dubai footprint with a two-year executive MBA, supported by Emeritus, to prepare senior leaders for an AI-first economy. Why is this the right time to launch this programme, particularly for senior executives looking to understand AI?

If you look at the Middle Eastern market, and this is also true in India, wherever there are growth markets, the number of fresh MBAs we are producing is not able to sustain the growth in that marketplace. They take a few years before they mature into middle and senior roles, while organisations are already managing growth with their existing talent.


Also Read: AI pushes B-schools to rethink curriculum, skills and leadership training

One option is to make the existing talent more competent and capable by enhancing their managerial capabilities. If you learn a job on the job, you also learn things and begin to manage. But if you know the formal frameworks which have worked and which have not worked, you will do the same job more effectively.

We thought it would be a good idea to bring managers together at weekends at our Dubai campus. Direct interaction with faculty members in the classroom, as well as peer interaction, will enhance their capabilities and give them a much richer learning experience.

The programme is expected to begin in the first half of 2027.

How will AI feature in the programme, given how quickly the technology is evolving?

If you look at our curriculum design, all our curriculums are being transformed as organisations themselves are changing. Many organisations have already shifted and transformed themselves with AI. Those which have not are also in the process of adopting AI more and more in their daily working.

Our classroom is usually a reflection of the reality of the industry. That’s why we say that we produce industry-ready management graduates. Our normal PGP (Post Graduate Programme) has also incorporated lots of AI-centricity. We have electives related to AI, but our core curriculum also incorporates case studies and other material reflecting AI’s role in organisations.

For cutting-edge skills related to AI, we are bringing in industry experts who are actually working in those technologies. These are more hands-on courses. The core curriculum and most of the domain curriculum are taught by our faculty, which is also continuously developing its expertise.

IIM Ahmedabad also has a specialised MBA in Business Analytics and AI. What is the distinction between that and the Dubai Executive MBA?

The Dubai programme is an Executive MBA. It is a normal MBA programme where the curriculum will reflect the reality of business organisations, and AI will automatically become part of it.

The MBA in Business Analytics and AI, which we launched last year in India, is a specialised programme. We structure our MBA around three capabilities. One is developing core leadership skills. The second is developing domain expertise. The third, which cuts across both, is developing emerging technology and other cutting-edge skills.

In this programme, AI is an integral part of the core curriculum. There is also a heavy practical component. Students undertake industry projects, sometimes using live projects from companies, to develop management systems using AI.

Also Read: ET AI Business Transformation Masterclass heads to IIM Bangalore to decode enterprise AI adoption

We need specialist management graduates who understand technology to a greater extent and also know how AI can be translated into different domains. I call them AI transformational managers.

Looking five to ten years ahead, will the traditional MBA model survive, or will management education shift towards continuous learning?

The MBA model will remain the same. The content will change.

The core leadership capabilities, which transform your thinking and characterise the mindset change you go through during the programme, will remain. But domain knowledge keeps changing.

If you remember, somebody doing an MBA in finance would have learnt certain investment strategies and management practices. Today, newer instruments and mechanisms have come in. Technology has brought share trading to a different level altogether. That is where the platform knowledge comes in.

Another aspect is emerging technology and learning to learn. Even our own MBAs, who graduated 20 or 30 years ago, keep coming back to us through executive education programmes to refresh their knowledge.

How do you see AI changing the employment landscape for management graduates?

Many graduates are hired to collect data for senior managers, put the data together and carry out basic analytics. AI can now do these things quickly. I don’t need three or four people assisting me. Maybe one or two people will be required. So that’s where the market squeeze will happen. I would say there will be fewer roles, rather than saying they will be eliminated.

At the senior level, you require people who have the skills to gather that data on their own or use these tools. You also need core skills: the ability to analyse different scenarios and evaluate them in an uncertain environment. Those people will be in shorter supply.

My prediction is that higher-end schools will see job buoyancy this year. The market will be very buoyant if you have the right set of capabilities.

Every transformation creates, destroys and reconstructs. We saw this earlier with IT and digital transformations. The same thing will happen with AI. We constructed systems using older programming languages, moved to more powerful systems, and now we are going to build AI-generated systems.

All those legacy systems also need to be transformed and made AI-enabled. Hundreds of thousands of people will be required for this transformation. Some existing roles will diminish, but new opportunities will emerge. The younger generation has to remain on its toes, keep learning and apply its intelligence.