IESE redesigns MBA for the age of AI

IESE Business School has announced a comprehensive redesign of its MBA curriculum to prepare leaders for a business environment increasingly shaped by artificial intelligence. Starting in September 2026, the program will focus on developing the capabilities required to redesign work, lead human–AI systems and make decisions under technological uncertainty, while reinforcing the formation of sound managerial judgment.

Since its inception, the IESE MBA has continuously evolved to meet the demands of a changing business landscape. Today, that landscape is being reshaped by a shift in how managerial work itself is defined. Organizations are no longer asking whether candidates can master AI tools, but whether they can redesign work, define how tasks are shared between humans and AI, evaluate outcomes and make decisions at the system level.

“We made a deliberate choice not to bolt AI onto a couple of electives and call it a transformation,” said Marc Badia, Deputy Dean of IESE Business School. “AI now runs through every first-year course, because in two years our graduates will be in roles where the question is not ‘can you use AI?’ but ‘can you lead and manage in a human+AI organization?’ That is a leadership challenge in every function – finance, operations, strategy – not a specialist topic.”

New leadership capabilities for AI-enabled workplaces

At the core of the new curriculum is a clear definition of what it means to be an AI-capable leader. The program is structured around three progressively developed capability areas:

• Personal AI fluency: the ability to work effectively with AI, including choosing the right tools for the task, structuring context, verifying outcomes and ensuring responsible use.
• AI-enabled workflow and operating model redesign: the capacity to rethink how work is organized, including identifying use cases, redefining roles and processes, setting evaluation metrics and enabling change management.
• Strategic AI acumen: the ability to make decisions at the system level, including innovating with business models, prioritizing investment and managing risk.

These are developed on a foundation of managerial judgment, cultivated through IESE’s case method. Cases now routinely include an AI-generated analysis as an object of evaluation, not as the answer. Students are trained to frame the right problem, judge whether the AI got it right, make skin-in-the-game decisions, and defend them in front of their peers and faculty.

Evgeny Kaganer, Associate Dean for Academic Affairs and Innovation at IESE, said: “Managerial work comes down to three things: deciding what should be done, getting it done, and then judging the outcomes and adjusting course. AI is now dramatically accelerating the middle, making the two ends – setting direction and exercising judgment – both harder and more valuable than before. Those are what we are training our MBAs for.”

The new curriculum integrates the development of AI  capabilities across 18 first-year courses and more than 40 AI-integrated sessions, addressing key managerial dilemmas students will actually face: Who is accountable when AI-augmented financial analysis is wrong? Where do the ethical limits fall when AI is used to shape consumer behavior? What does apprenticeship look like when AI is doing the work that used to train junior managers? What does competitive advantage mean when AI keeps resetting industry cost structures?

This is complemented by pre-program courses and workshops to ensure every student has a baseline level of AI technical knowledge and application skills. The second year further reinforces these capabilities through electives and projects that deepen technical understanding, transformational skills, and judgment. Students can pursue a concentration on AI, Tech, Data and Digital Business with 27 electives available.

Students also build a portfolio of applied work across the program, ranging from AI audits and agentic workflow blueprints to vibe-coded MVPs of new business ideas, so they graduate with tangible evidence of their capabilities. This approach is complemented by IESE’s close collaboration with employers to ensure alignment between what is taught, how it is assessed and what organizations are seeking from leaders of AI-augmented workplaces.

A humanistic approach to AI leadership

This redesign is part of IESE’s broader strategic focus on enabling leaders to think, act and lead adeptly and responsibly in the age of AI, and builds on the work of the school’s Artificial Intelligence and the Future of Management Initiative.

By integrating AI throughout the MBA with a humanistic approach to leadership, IESE reinforces its commitment to developing leaders who have a positive impact on business and society. At a time when technology is reshaping how decisions are made and organizations operate, it also highlights the increasing value of pursuing an MBA with a human-centric approach today.

This latest curriculum redesign reflects the innovative spirit at the heart of IESE’s MBA. The program is consistently ranked among the best in the world and has placed in the global top five for the past four consecutive years in the Financial Times Global MBA Ranking, underscoring its continued relevance in a changing business landscape.