Dr. Mukta Kulkarni on keeping the human at the heart of an AI-first MBA

At an Insight Talk by BSmart Business Standard on the theme ‘The AI-first MBA: What should we still teach students when AI can do almost everything’, Dr. Mukta Kulkarni, Dean, Programmes, IIM Bangalore, joined Prof. Aditya Mohan Jadhav, Founding Dean, TAPMI; Dr. Umesh Kothari, SP Jain School of Global Management; and Dr. Sandhya Haridas, VP & Global Delivery Unit Head, L&T Technology Services, to discuss how AI is reshaping management education.

Dr. Mukta discouraged framing discourse surrounding the adoption of AI in teaching and learning as “professor versus AI”. The future, she said, is about “professor and AI”. With AI taking over transactional and repetitive aspects of teaching, faculty can spend more time on what is deeply human – building communities, bringing in a variety of opinions, challenging students, guiding them through ambiguity, and helping them unlearn and rethink.

The shift is also changing how students are assessed at IIMB. Prof. Mukta shared the example of courses where students have traditionally written reports drawing on primary and secondary data from organizations. The focus is now on whether students can understand, defend and extend the work they have done. She also spoke about an “AI-native midterm” developed by a faculty member, where students build chatbots and are assessed on prompt engineering and optimization techniques.

Prof. Mukta does not discourage students from using AI agents. The more important question, she said, is what they do with the output. Students need to test AI-generated responses, introduce counterfactuals and question answers that sound polished but lack specificity or nuance.

“Our careers are not just about our expertise – so much more makes us good humans”, she said. For her, that is where the larger purpose of management education lies: AI can expand what students can do, but education must continue to shape how they think, engage with others and navigate the world.

The panel also examined AI’s implications in decision-making, the importance of contextual and judgmental intelligence, and the changing expectations from management graduates as AI becomes embedded across industries.