Agentic Business Education: Case Method 100X'd

We discussed the importance and benefits of the Case Study Method in business education in Case Study Method in Business Education: Instructor is the Key. Incorporating the essential components of effective learning, see Effective Learning, this method has been a prominent approach in business education, guided by instructors, during the past century. However, there are a few bottlenecks in this method:

1. This method is time- and material-intensive in nature. Consequently, instructors with a vast array of experience and knowledge, cannot oversee the progress of each individual student and provide personalized feedback based on each individual student’s capabilities and knowledge. 
2. These case studies often rely on historical data and scenarios, which biases the students in judging the decisions, given the benefit of hindsight. 
3. Students don’t get to make authentic decisions and see how their own decisions would have worked out, rather they just have to assess the decisions made by others. They have to practice the hypothetical scenarios, rather than seeing the results in action.

With recent advancements in AI, and the emergence of AI agents (explained below), it is possible to revolutionize the case study method. With AI, instructors can design simulated scenarios for their students, so they can put theory into practice, make decisions and see how they pan out. Here are a few examples: 

• Imagine a scenario where a student has to manage a coffee business. The news just arrived that humidity is expected to decrease in Vietnam, indicating a potential drop in the harvest and a rise in coffee prices. What is the right decision? Switch suppliers? Pass the cost to customers? Or both?
• Imagine a scenario where all the students in the class are also in the coffee business. If everyone decides to stockpile cups for an upcoming event, what happens? Prices soar due to increased Supplier Power. Conversely, if no one differentiates their product, Competitive Rivalry pushes prices down, squeezing margins. How would one innovate to stand out?
• Or consider a sudden tariff hike on Brazilian exports. How does it affect the supply chain? What would be the right pricing strategy?

With AI, the boundaries between reality and theory blur. These are not just hypothetical scenarios; they are live simulations where each business is affected by the macro-environment and every decision has immediate consequences. 

With this technology, Professors can create simulations, with a few lines of natural language, or use of pre-defined templates, so that students can put into practice all the theories they learned in class. On top of that, with the help of AI assistants, instructors can get roll-up views of all the students’ progress, with the ability to dive deeper into details by asking specific questions from the AI assistant. For instance: What are the main strengths among the students? Who needs more attention regarding pricing strategies? Give me the students with the highest revenue projections until now.

But how is this possible?

Agentic World After Recent AI Revolution

Thanks to the recent advancements in AI, Large Language Models (LLMs) are capable of understanding human language and performing specific tasks required of them. These Models can be prompted to have characteristics and act as experts in a specific domain based on internal knowledge as well as external data. An AI Model that is prompted to perform a specific task with unique characteristics is called an AI Agent.

Based on a report published by McKinsey and Company, AI agents are going to unlock trillions of dollars in value, and they will be everywhere. And we are already witnessing how different industries, such as Finance, Law and Pharma, have been positively impacted by this agentic technology. The users of these agents are more productive, i.e. they can achieve more in less time. The education industry is not an exception. AI agents are being adopted by schools to serve as tutors, teaching assistants, or even language assistants. In each of these cases, there’s an AI agent with a unique set of skills and characteristics that helps us achieve specific goals.

Learning Business in the Era of AI Agents

There are heated debates about whether AI is going to replace human beings. But based on the data since the launch of ChatGPT3.5, it turns out it is not AI that’s replacing people; people who adopt AI are replacing people who are not utilizing this technology. 

In the education industry, the next 100X improvement comes from an agentic world where students find themselves in simulations, or digital twins of the real world mimicked by a collective of agents, where they can practice different scenarios and make a variety of decisions, and see how they work out. Students can safely try, fail, learn, and repeat. They can ideate, and build multiple virtual businesses, in different economies and cultures, with different regulations and market conditions. 

Thanks to the AI agent boom, it is possible to simulate micro- and macro-economics. It’s possible to have AI agents who have access to real-time data, news, companies’ quarterly reports, laws and regulations of different countries, stock market data, and weather conditions. It is possible to have AI agents take on the role of a venture capitalist, or a conservative customer on the other side of the world. It is possible to simulate the culture differences, and language barriers into the system.

Now imagine where all these agents are at the fingertip of an instructor whose main focus is to train the next generation of businessmen and businesswomen. The instructor can orchestrate these agents, with just a few natural language prompts, so that the students are exposed to different levels of complexity when it comes to solving business problems. Students don’t have to go back in time and look at how a coffee business was affected by a revolution in Kenya decades ago. They can live the life of the Startbucks' CEO today. They can try and make decisions in these safe digital environments. At the same time, with the help of a Teaching Assistant AI Agent, professors can get a roll-up of all the progress, shortcomings, strengths, and learning points for each individual student.

We are seeing a world where each student can create small digital avatars of themselves, each acting out ideas or decisions, and learning from each outcome. Students can create businesses, make decisions, and fail, but in a world where failing is not as expensive as it would be in real life. I like to bring up the simulations used in the aviation industry. Flying simulations not only haven’t replaced aviation science, flight training, or flight instructors, but have drastically improved the pilots’ skills, and the results are obvious in the decrease of pilot-error-related incidents. In the same way, agentic business simulations empower instructors to train and prepare their students for real-life scenarios, and provide students with hands-on experience that their peers, who haven’t used AI-based simulations, can’t dream of.