With the proliferation of artificial intelligence, alarm bells are going off in higher education. The worry? That professors will be replaced as students trade critical thinking for a powerful new crutch.
But instead of presenting a crisis, generative AI could simply be an agent (pun intended) for crystallizing and refining what the educational process was supposed to be about all along: critical thinking and problem solving, especially in the field of international business, where culture, language and cross-border regulation drive growing complexity.
The AI revolution’s impact on learning was among the many topics explored during Georgia State University CIBER’s annual International Business Pedagogy Workshop, held in Atlanta last June.
With registration open for this year’s workshop, set to explore similar ideas under the theme Teach Beyond, Engage Smarter, Lead the Future on May 27-29, Global Atlanta caught up with some of the experts featured in panels and keynotes, who shared a heartening picture: While change, the only constant, is coming rapidly, educators are quickly adapting with tools and methods to address foundational questions.
Human Touch at a Premium
John Riesenberger, a longtime global business executive and co-author of the Pearson’s International Business: The New Realities textbook alongside Gary Knith and Tamer Cavusgil, Executive Director at GSU-CIBER, said the world has not yet reckoned with what the World Economic Forum has dubbed the “Fifth Industrial Revolution.”
Th new era will result in signicant changes in the basic nature of work, he argues, with AI robots and agents projected to automate more than 50 percent of U.S. work hours.
With that comes opporutnity, as human-AI partnerships optimize the unique advantages of both, resulting in improved productivity, increased accuracy and reduced costs.
“Because these AI robots and agents are doing a lot of the technical tasks that people used to do, the question is now: What will humans do? Well, humans are going to be mostly interacting with other humans,” said Mr. Riesenberger, who led a session titled “What Skills Do Employers Expect from Business Graduates?”
This transformation will enable humans to perform higher-level tasks that machines cannot, such as complex problem solving, human oversight, ethical governance, interpersonal relationship development, and the development of strategic decision-making within teams.
These higher-level tasks will require that new college graduates present with proven competence in both hard skills for technical fluency — like data structures and algorithms, analysis, machine learning and more — as well as soft (people, durable) skills like communication, critical thinking, collaboration and leadership.
“In the first place, professors need to become competent and certified in these skills. It’s pretty hard to teach something if you’re not qualified to teach it,” he said, noting that traditional curricula will also need to redesigned to inco
Given the uneven utility of many certifications out there, however, Mr. Riesenberger challenged educators to think through the means by which students, upon graduation, should be able to prove they’ve acquired the necessary hard and soft skills to thrive in the business world.
Back to Basics
Meanwhile, the power of ChatGPT and other tools like it is challenging professors to rethink from the ground up how they assess students’ knowledge and grade their work, says Kim Manturuk, executive director of Georgia State’s Center for Excellence in Teaching, Learning, and Online Education.
A 10-page capstone analysis of a particular global business market at the end of an MBA course, for instance, can be made in minutes with artificial intelligence; so the question now is not the production of the paper itself, but mimicking the decision-making processes that middle-management executives face, and which large language models can’t (yet) undertake.
“It’s requiring our faculty to go back to the basics and think about, ‘What is the learning objective? What do I want students to remember from this experience six months from now?’ and then, ‘How am I going to get them to that place?’”
While forcing students to conduct their own analysis early on is a useful exercise, they’re not starting their work lives conducting three years of background research, said Dr. Manturuk, who led a session on digital resources at the workshop.
“They’re actually getting to make decisions, bringing their own unique skill set. And so I see (AI) creating a lot of opportunities.”
Educators, who are short on time and training with AI tools, however, are still playing catchup, which is why Dr. Manturuk relished the opportunity to mingle with faculty and learn from their real-world experiences on the perils and promise of AI for anything from grading to testing.
Everything, it seems, is subject to being upended.
“One of the things I saw, particularly at the CIBER event, is just this community of practice-building. People would go around and share with each other, ‘I’m trying this,’ And someone would say, ‘I wonder if I could take that from your class and put it into my class,’” Dr. Manturuk said. “I think (workshops like FDIB pedagogy) are incredibly valuable because this is such a new and emerging field. Things that I was telling faculty six months ago about teaching with AI are not true anymore.”
What Companies Look For: Experience and Adaptability
With all this in view, longtime Coca-Cola Co. and Kimberly-Clark executive Nadeem Zaman was tasked during his keynote address to give educators a sense for what companies are looking for as they seek to recruit culturally competent, tech-literate hires.
The key, especially in international business, where so much depends on cultural context, is adaptability, especially when the pace of change in learning is so rapid.
Global companies may have a consistent strategy around the world, for instance, but it will have to be localized for particular markets. Business leaders who win will be the ones who use AI and other tools to come to these realizations, and change their approaches, more quickly, Mr. Zaman said.
The pedagogy workshop, Mr. Zaman noted, was a way to “fuse the theory into practicality in terms of what’s happening on ground at the moment.”
One way to achieve cultural awareness is to study abroad in a foreign land, a key focus of Georgia State’s global education initiatives, but the same process can happen in a diverse classroom or in an intentionally designed domestic program as well, said Grambling State University School of Business Dean Derrick Warren, noting that the CIBER workshop was “transformative” in helping faculty from the historically Black college.
“Experiential learning is essential to career readiness. At Grambling, we’ve extended that philosophy into internships, co‑ops, entrepreneurship projects and study abroad. In addition, the GRAMPreneurs and digital‑credentialing initiatives give students hands‑on experience with entrepreneurship and emerging technologies,” Dr. Warren said, continuing:
“These experiences sharpen marketable skills such as cross‑cultural communication, adaptability, teamwork, data literacy and ethical decision‑making. Even when students cannot travel abroad, experiences like the GSU-CIBER Case Competition allows them to engage with international scenarios in the classroom. Experiential learning is essential to bridging theory and practice. The competitions helped students build entrepreneurial, analytical and soft skills. Whether abroad or on campus, these experiences cultivate adaptability, cross‑cultural communication, problem‑solving and teamwork…skills employers consistently demand.”
Morehouse College‘s Sherrhonda Gibbs, Dean of the Business and Economics Division, said that resource challenges can seem “insurmountable” at small schools, but she pointed to corporate partnerships as bridging the gap, nodding to a recent gift from Boeing that enabled a study-abroad trip to Brazil.
The program in Salvador, Bahia, gave both faculty and students to engage in cultural exchange, practice Portuguese and compare notes with their counterparts at a Brazilian university.
The GSU-CIBER workshop, she said, was a way to compare notes with other educators on similarly impactful initiatives.
“I would say this workshop is truly one-of-a-kind and a must attend for international business professors seeking new knowledge and best practices in their field for student engagement, teaching and preparation for careers in global industries,” said Dr. Gibbs.
Learn more about the 2026 International Business Pedagogy Workshop here, or find a video from the 2024 event below:
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